


A Country of Smaller Wars

by levendis



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M, Violence, oldfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 12:17:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2581199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking for home in all the wrong places: Narvin, professional voyeur and artful patriot, follows his ex-president, a con-man, and a savage through alternate universes only to find himself pretty much, but not quite, back where he started. Spoilers through the end of season four.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Other People

**Author's Note:**

> You are here  
> and elsewhere, your face breeding like fear.  
> It is not for nothing that I keep my hands  
> raised for the fall. This is a country of smaller wars.
> 
>  
> 
> ~ Stephen Dobyns, "Counterpoints"

  
  
The city wants to know what Narvin's done for it lately.   
  
He's in his office, top floor of the CIA headquarters, watching the first sun set in the canyon of the Maqattac Boulevard. Skyscrapers gleaming on either side. Office buildings, condominiums, in alloy and plate glass, cutting-edge architectural technology. Transdimensional buildings, physically improbable buildings, buildings in constant temporal shift. Millions of people walking around down there, few of them with any idea just how delicate the situation is. Gallifrey exists through sheer force of will; the tiniest lapse, the smallest mistake, and the whole planet could come tumbling apart.  
  
The transduction barrier flickers in the distance. This is the garrison at the center of time. The city is a fortress, was a castle once. They still call the chapter heads of the Chancellery Guard _castellans_. The lexicon knows, even if the public doesn't.   
  
  
The students are coming today. The first ship has already landed, a cargo carrier from Earth, holding three hundred tons of mining equipment and two dozen children. Five more are en route. The president will be there, at the quay, shaking hands and making statements to the press, posing for the cameras. The Chancellery Guard will escort them to the Academy gates, where Braxiatel is waiting. The ceremonial ushering in of the invasion.  
  
He turns his back to the window. "I hate wars fought with children."  
  
"As do we all." Darkel smiles, in what he assumes to be an effort at appearing understanding, or comforting. Darkel has never been all that good at masking her true intentions. It's one of the reasons he's willing to work with her, that he knows her particular failings and weaknesses. An evil, but a predictable one, and currently a necessary one as well.   
  
"We proceed, then. No grandstanding, no vigilantism. We do this the right way or there's no sense in doing it at all."  
  
"Don't worry, Coordinator, you can trust me." She reaches out to shake his hand; he draws back, busies himself with sorting paperwork that doesn't need sorting.  
  
"No, I can't," he says, not looking up.   
  
"I must protest, I've been perfectly-"  
  
"That's enough. You can leave, now." He straightens, fixes her gaze, with the blank stare he knows to be intimidating or at least unnerving. She wavers, huffs, readjusts her robes about her shoulders, then turns and leaves. In silence, thankfully.  
  
There's a stillness, here. This is a hinge point. After this, the world is a different place. The decision's already been made.  
  
"I do what I must," he says to the empty room, or maybe to the city outside.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Two of his agents arrive in his office twenty microspans after the day's council meeting. They've never met; they carefully avoid looking at each other. He waits fifteen seconds before acknowledging them.  
  
"This is your last chance to change your minds," he says, finally looking up from the console. "There will be no way back."  
  
They nod. He has them sign the relevant forms. He watches them begin to register the finality of the situation. The enormity of what they're about to do. They have already forsaken their Houses, whether actively or emotionally, and they are about to forsake themselves. This could be a desperate, desolate moment, if they were people to acknowledge that sort of thing. Instead, they remain stoic as he leads them through the corridors.   
  
Into the computer's statistically average personalities and pasts, he lays suggestions. He gives them probabilities: 60% chance of marriage, 35% chance of a dead-end job, 2% chance of death by reckless driving. He weights the die. He slides a Chameleon Arch onto each of their heads, attaches the electrodes and injects the serum, then leaves to observe from an adjoining room. They are downloaded and partitioned. For a moment, they are empty. Then he flips the switch.  
  
He's been told it's a painful process. Their language has been cut from them, their voices reset; they scream like animals. He's thankful for the sound-proof walls.  
  
When they've settled, he removes the arches and implants a microscopic, nearly-indetectable data recorder into their cerebral cortices. Vansell had commissioned the first tracker, though he'd never seemed comfortable using it. Narvin has few qualms. Ethics are a luxury, after all.   
  
They will wake up as strangers. He wonders what that's like.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Gryben is a breeding ground for terrorists. It's a prison camp for people who didn't know they were breaking any laws, of course they get angry. Amateur adventurers who thought they'd be killing an ancient dictator or shaking their great-grandfather's hand, or skipping forward to an imagined promised land, they all step outside the doors of their hobby-kit time machines and find themselves here. The shanty town at the end of the universe. They have no recourse, nowhere to go, nothing to do except maintain the thriving black market. And join the Free Time insurgency, of course.   
  
Every temporal power has an embassy, but Gallifrey's is the only one that gets bombed. Twice in the past year, plus countless threats and demonstrations, a barrage of graffiti, and the assassination of an ambassador by a sniper camping out in the health clinic across the street. There's a barrier, now.   
  
His office is in the basement. It's suitably airless, over-lit and overwhelmingly beige. There's the same furniture as in his office on Black Rock, partly out of habit and partly for the disorientation it causes. A desk, two chairs. No personal effects. A registration form, an aid application form, a pen.   
  
She's writing, he's tapping his fingers against the plastic desktop. There's no other sounds.   
  
"Welcome to Gryben," he says, watching her fill in the form. Her hand is steady, no pauses and nothing crossed out.   
  
"Get stuffed," she replies.   
  
He carefully raises his right eyebrow, then stands up, the noise of the chair scraping against tile impossibly loud. She flinches. "Your papers will be processed within the week," he says. "Office 271a will provide a temporary ID, office 271b will assign housing and a credit number, and office 271c shows an informative video half past the hour from eight to eleven. A copy of the guide book can be obtained from the information desk in the front hall."  
  
"Where do I go to register a complaint?"  
  
"There's a suggestion box at the information desk. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a few questions." He shines a light in her eyes. "What's your name?"  
  
"Daniella Walker," she says. No hint of hesitation, good.   
  
"Do you know who I am?"  
  
She squints up at him. He turns the light off. She looks at his face, then his robes, then rolls her eyes. "You're a Time Lord. Am I supposed to be impressed or something?" She absently fingers the locket hanging around her neck.  
  
"Do you know where you are?"  
  
"The embassy. What is this? You have my paperwork. And I haven't done anything wrong."  
  
"Not yet, anyway." He smiles widely, aware of how false it looks. He's never been good at facial expressions. "It's just routine. Nothing to worry about. It's already over, in fact. The guard will show you out. Have a pleasant day."  
  
She rolls her eyes again and stands up, giving him one last look of contempt before leaving the room.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The CIA has operatives everywhere. Assassins, recon scouts, bribed officials, sleeper agents. The long arm of temporal law can reach to the ends of the universe, Vansell used to say. Anyone could be a spy. _You_ could be a spy and never even know it. So many secret lives, and so much at stake, all the fault lines of history and all the people guarding them.   
  
Deception is in a Time Lord's nature, Vansell had said. _We are all of us other people._ Narvin's been other people but he's never been a spy, as such. He'd done bomb work in the east. Graduated with a degree in temporal mechanics, imagined a future in the shipyards or else one of the research companies springing up in the capitol, good money, solid work - ended up instead in the desert, working in Glauer's weapons group, a state-funded operation, writing code for artron containment systems. They split time and put it back together in increasingly baroque ways, the alkali flats of the test site slipping and folding over the fact of themselves. Top-secret, very hush hush. Systems work, rumor work, compiling symbol chains in a bunker hidden below twenty feet of salt gravel.   
  
The TFD, how do you call it, debacle, was where the CIA recruited him. The guards have guns, but the spooks have _devices_ , and Narvin was a device man, a containment expert, a person capable of building a box you could put doomsday particles in without fear of contamination or premature detonation. He could make a box you'd put an entire apocalypse into with the highest external safety standards. The CIA was intrigued. He was slipped almost without notice into Special Projects. Ordnance, anomaly utilization, stochastic engineering, the Oubliette. He did well, he kept his head down while everyone else went crazy or renegade. He was promoted to department chief just in time for Vansell to get himself killed.   
  
The president had wanted a scientist to front the Agency. An operator, not an operative. He's occasionally wondered whether she picked his name at random; there were other choices, better choices, people with field experience and political savvy and the ability to hold a conversation without shouting, who hadn't spent the last two centuries sequestered in a laboratory. She promoted him, so halfway through his lives, he found himself needing to fake his way through a new profession.   
  
Being a spy, he's found, doesn't mean becoming someone else, but becoming no one. Becoming unremarkable, unnoticeable, invisible. The best spy will disappear, surface only to accomplish the mission, and then leave quietly. Narvin may have traded the scientist's discretion for the public, politic face of the Coordinator, but he still knows how to fade into the background. That might be part of why he was chosen; the president, on their first meeting, knew nothing about him other than that he wasn't Vansell. Maybe she'd thought he'd been a spy all along, not a nobody but a consummate anybody.   
  
She still doesn't know much about him, and he does his best to keep it that way. She sees his title, a vague annoyance, a symbol of the things she feels is wrong with society. Notably, she lets him keep his job, and does relatively little to interfere. She doesn't need to know what he really does in order to reap the CIA's benefits. And she shouldn't know, of course. He is the dirt kept off her hands, her pragmatism outsourced. It doesn't bother him. Why would it?  
  
He sold his name for three spans of surveillance footage. He finds he doesn't miss it much. His name, stripped of familial inheritance and coded details, is short and easily forgotten. There is no weight to it. He is himself short and easily forgotten, a fact which may have bothered him in this regeneration's youth but now feels like a blessing. No one looks twice. He works hard to make sure they don't change their minds. He sold his name and would sell the rest of himself if Gallifrey demanded it. He is CIA. This is his identity. Anything else is superfluous.  
  
  
  
It's morning and cold and grey, and there are six packets waiting for him on his office computer. He presses the electrodes to his skin and turns the device on, and opens Walker's report. Not Walker, he reminds himself. Don't use names. Never use names. She'll be Red Wolf in his files; a code name for a false identity in a program that doesn't exist. Obfuscation, plausible deniability. He starts the playback.  
  
The office in front of him flickers and is replaced by a small, dark room. He's sitting on the edge of a bed. There's a gun in his hands. He's holding it like he doesn't know how to use it, like he's afraid of it. It's heavier than he thought it'd be.  
  
"We have to be prepared," the man sitting next to him says. "There's a revolution coming, and it won't be bloodless. You need to learn how to protect yourself."  
  
He's looking at the staser in his hands like it's a foreign object. "This isn't what I expected," he says. _She_ says. He (she) turns the staser over in his (her) fingers, then slides it into a duffel bag on the floor. This feeling: fear? Disappointment? Resignation? Something complicated, something dangerous.  
  
The room flickers. He's looking out of a window, somewhere high up, watching the people below. Like ants, or atoms; a swarm, a process. Objects moving inevitably along a path. He's thinking about fate, or something quite like it.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He wonders what it'll be like being on the other end of this conversation. How that seething, self-righteous hate will feel, what he'll look like through her eyes. Yourself as you are and as others see you: he assumes he'll be a monster. He's fine with that.  
  
"Fascist scum," she spits out. "Hypocrite. Oppressor. _Bastard._ "  
  
"I just need to ask you a few questions," he says mildly. "I'd appreciate it if you refrained from answering entirely in rhetoric."  
  
"I won't give you any information. Do what you like to my body, but you'll never get my mind."   
  
He leans against the table, makes a show of flipping through paperwork. "There are several ways to make you talk. Some of these involve forms of physical coercion, true, but not all. Even so, surely a revolutionary such as yourself would be willing to sacrifice creature comforts for the cause. You do believe in the cause, don't you?"   
  
"Do you believe in gravity? Mathematics? Death? Free Time is not a cause, it is a _fact_ , one which you Time Lords refuse to acknowledge." She's still struggling against the cuffs; futile, but she's got an act to put on as much as he does.  
  
"Rhetoric," he reminds her. "And funnily enough, none of the constants you mentioned are really constants at all. Everything is variable. Time is variable, the cause is variable, your devotion to it - well. I see you're a student, on academic leave?"  
  
She's silent.   
  
"'Reason for coming to Gryben: tourism'. You consider yourself a tourist, Miss Walker?" No answer. "You were on the planet for two months. During that time, you associated with several known terrorists and participated in the dissemination of propaganda. You were arrested twice, once for disturbing the peace, once for unlawful assembly. Both non-violent offenses."  
  
"I won't tell you anything." Her jaw is set, eyes watering. She stares at a point somewhere past his shoulder.   
  
"I don't need you to. You see, Miss Walker, there's nothing you can tell me that I don't already know. You're not a particularly important person. You're here because if I don't interrogate a certain quota of suspects, the cardinals believe I'm not doing my job. You must know how important it is to keep up appearances. No, you will not be tortured or subjected to the mind probe or whatever terrible acts you imagine me capable of. You will be released unharmed, as long as you agree to one thing."  
  
"I'll agree to _nothing_."   
  
He ignores her. "You will tell whoever is in charge of your little - organization, that Free Time has been infiltrated, for quite some time now. I doubt you'll discover who it is, as even they don't know what they are. I imagine you'll try your hardest, though. I wish you the best of luck."  
  
"I trust my friends. It's a trick, and I won't fall for it. All you people are liars."   
  
"You trust them? Two months, on a tourist visa. I wonder." He presses a button; the restraints around her wrists and ankles relax. "You're an idealist, Miss Walker. Idealists are always disappointed, in the end."  
  
"Better to be disappointed than to never believe in anything at all." She stands up, and with a somewhat forced air of defiance walks through the door.   
  
  
The problem with dramatic exits is that sometimes you need to undo them. He sighs, gets his rain cloak from the closet, and follows her out.  
  
She's at the edge, leaning over the railing. He can't see her face but he imagines she has a suitable look of chagrin, hopefully mixed with despair. Beyond her, and all around them, is the Petraean Sea.   
  
"We're on an island," he shouts over the wind. "Black Rock, barely a speck on the most detailed map. Completely isolated, no one can help you and you can't go anywhere without my consent. Unless you'd care to swim. Transmat capsules are back this way."  
  
She's still staring out at the water. He's getting bored. "This is not a sight-seeing trip, Miss Walker. Please stop wasting my time."  
  
She turns and walks past him, head bowed against the storm, less defiant than before. She's saying something, but between the wind and the rain hitting his hood, he can't quite make it out. It doesn't really matter, he knows what she means. He made her, of course he knows.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He's walking quickly. It's not safe after sundown. There's the wail of a police siren, music coming from a window above, a fight about to break out on the corner. He's thinking _23 days_ , like a mantra. Hands jammed in his pockets, one fist closed around the drive, the other around a knife. 23 days. Don't make eye contact. Stick to the street lights.   
  
23 days before his case comes before the board. He's got insurance this time, they can't turn him away again. He'll name names, he'll sell her out if he has to. He can't take another year on this planet. Someone told him today that 'Gryben' means 'land of plenty' in Arvonese; plenty of what, junkies? Idiot tourists? Armed guards?  
  
He's turning down the walkway to the project building, his hand's sweating on the knife handle. Someone's put a poster up over the seal of Rassilon on the gate. _The Future Won't Wait._ He's keying in his access code, he's stepping gingerly over a vagrant in the front hall. He's thinking twenty-three more days and he'll never have to smell this again.   
  
He is opening the door to his unit. He is watching his wife sleep, her arm stretched over the place on the mattress where he should be. He is considering the junction where collarbone turns into shoulder. He feels something, what is this, like he can't breathe, like there is nothing at all in the universe except him and this woman, a room and a doorway, like time has compressed into this one single instant. This is - wanting, longing, he thinks, this is desire curling up inside him. He is watching his wife open her eyes and close them again, turning pointedly away. Time stutters, and continues onward. He is discovering a place inside himself that is suddenly empty.  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The insomnia is nothing new. An all-nighter is standard operating procedure, two days awake is a busy week. Three days is cause for concern, but there's stimulants to be had and work to be done. Four days, and he'd be in the infirmary if he weren't trying to clear his name of treason. Everything narrows, everything is worse, brighter, louder, more confusing. He can't focus, can't function. The world is operating without him. There's a possibility that something might be wrong.  
  
Things happen, he's there when they do, but he can't think fast enough to stop any of it. Chaos is the status quo of Gallifreyan politics, but this is a special day: he goes from a routine investigation to Darkel nearly arresting him to stumbling blindly around the vaults listening to Braxiatel confess one of his many sins, after which he watches Romana discuss the pros of world domination with a projection of her former self and a disembodied voice. The beginnings of hysterical laughter are welling up inside him right before he gets shot.   
  
There are blank spots in his memory when he finally wakes up. Maybe it's exhaustion, maybe they took something; it's not a gap, per se, just an imprecision. Nobody seems interested in informing him. Romana sends a note which doesn't quite say what happened. Something about Matrix partitions and security risks. No apology, either, not even _Your planet thanks you for your sacrifice._   
  
It's Leela, annoyingly enough, who finally tells him. "It was Pandora," she says, working hard around the unfamiliar syllables. "A ghost in the catacombs. She possessed you so she could do her evil works. Romana and the other Romana made her leave, but then she came back, so K9 shot you."  
  
"Give me a nanospan to unpack that," he says.   
  
"You were like a puppet, and Romana cut your strings." She thinks she's being helpful.  
  
"By having me shot? What a calm, measured response." Something's almost, almost clicking in his head. Romana and Romana and the strange, lingering ache at his temples, and, oh, _Braxiatel._ The hypocritical, tampering bastard. "Suddenly there's more of everyone I loathe," he says, mostly to himself. "Two Romanas, and a - what would you call it, a gaggle? A gaggle of Braxiatels. Two of those ridiculous robot dogs. Next thing, I'll be receiving a report that Wynter tripped and fell into a cloning device. There's still just the one of you, yes?"  
  
"One of me is more than enough to keep an eye on you," she says with a sneer.  
  
"I'm counting on it. How else would I spend my idle hours if I didn't have to constantly struggle to keep my dastardly plans safe from your guile and cunning?" He gives his best empty smile, then walks away with as much flourish as he can muster.  
  
 _Clever words won't save you,_ she's calling after him. _I know what you are._   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He's in a space port. He's fighting someone. The man is taller, stronger, knows more about how to do this than he does. There are people arranged around them, cheering, shouting. Some of these people he recognizes as his friends. He is being punched in the face; he is falling. The floor is hard and smooth. There are lights, noises, he sees boots and flight attendant slippers and the blood coming out of his nose. There are hands grabbing his shoulders and pulling him up. "You okay, mate?" a voice is asking. He says, he says, he doesn't know what he says. "I coulda told you you'd lose, not like you'd ever listen. Let me buy you a drink, we'll stop by the infirmary later."   
  
He's wiping blood off his face. He's grinning. "I got a few good shots in, can't deny that," he slurs. There's an arm slung across his shoulder, supporting him. They're walking to a bar.  
  
  
His office swims back into view. "That wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary," he mutters. He picks up the device, turns it over in his hands. He'll re-write the code for the filtering program as soon as he can scrape together a free span. Then again, there's clues in everything. Maybe this is important. Maybe he's missing something. The fight, the blood, the friend, the bar. Maybe there's something there. He rubs at his face, that phantom pain. Maybe, maybe not.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Braxiatel has the same air his brother did before he left. The wink and nod, the amused acquiescence, the self-aware detachment, something hard and sharp under all the posturing. The calculated, obvious falseness of everything he says. He's a hedonist without the hedonist's commitment to physical surrender - he drinks, but not too much, lets cigars idle in the ashtray, visits the bagnio but never rents a room.   
  
He sends a message. _The new masseuse is stunning. I've put your name on the waitlist, come soonest._ It's fairly transparent, as far as his communiques go. The standard level of insult and mockery. Narvin debates ignoring it entirely, but Braxiatel never calls without significant cause. So he goes.  
  
The baths are a relic, like half of this city. The ritual of luxury, or the luxury of ritual. Two floors of, basically, water: hot and cold, still and sprayed, immersion and drying-off and re-immersion. Occasionally ointments applied by skilled professionals. Occasionally other things.   
  
The heat, or the sybaritism, but he feels sick. A revulsion, almost.   
  
He finds Braxiatel in a sauna, louche and towel-clad. He averts his eyes and clears his throat over the low rumble of the air filtration system.  
  
"Coordinator! Always a pleasure to see you. Come, sit down." Braxiatel gestures to the bench beside him.   
  
Narvin remains standing. "I fail to see why you wanted to meet me here." He pulls at his collar; he's beginning to feel light-headed. Steam rises.  
  
"You'd feel better if you weren't wearing quite so many layers, Narvin. We're here because I'm a busy man, and I refuse to give up my weekly span of peace for a dreary meeting in a dreary office with, well, _you_. I do hope this isn't too awkward for you."  
  
"Not at all, Cardinal Braxiatel." He clasps his hands behind his back and affects a stance of nonchalance. He does not look at the Cardinal, or any of the other half-naked, half-asleep men scattered about the room.  
  
"Your generation is so prudish. Perhaps if you allowed yourself to relax once in a while, you'd be better equipped to deal with the rigors of the High Council. No matter. I've called you here to deliver a piece of information."  
  
"If it's confidential, I suggest we move to somewhere more private."  
  
"On the slight chance that any of these gentlemen are paying attention, I doubt they'd understand or even care." Braxiatel closes his eyes and slouches down. "Blue Wolf is out of commission," he says, off-handedly.  
  
Narvin swallows. Every muscle in his body stiffens. Behind his back, his hands white-knuckle around each other. "When?" he asks, tightly.  
  
"This morning. I trust you'll make the necessary arrangements. That'll be all, Coordinator."  
  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Blue Wolf is being kept in a local hospital. Retrieval is simple. He lands his TARDIS in the morgue after working hours and slides the cart in. He does not pull the cover back, instead does a quick blood test to verify the body's identity. He takes the locket from around the body's neck, and opens it. The body falls back into itself, cold skin shifting; the mind will be saved to the Matrix, after a certain amount of editing, and the corpse will be burnt. He can't afford any loose ends.  
  
Red Wolf is returning from work. Narvin settles the TARDIS down inside her apartment, and sits down in an armchair to wait.   
  
The front door opens. " _You_ again," she says. "This is breaking and entering. This is illegal. I don't care who you are or who you work for, you can't just-"  
  
He presses a button on his handheld computer, and watches her change facial expressions at least five times before schooling herself to blankness.   
  
"There's been a complication," he says. "The mission is being put on hold." She nods vaguely.  
  
Inside the TARDIS, his agent sits in the conference room writing her report. He waits until she's done before sliding the needle into her neck; she'll come to feeling groggy but healthy, and with a fresh set of memories in her head. He takes the data pad from her limp hands and carefully deletes everything.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He is dreaming about Gallifrey falling. He's dreaming about a dead world, the country laid to waste. He's dreaming of a field: his boots sticking in the mud, the ache in his legs and his chest and his head, the desperation, how all he wants is to give up and lie down in the muck, lie down and wait to die. He is dreaming about a wolf running hungrily ahead of him, and he is following her.   
  
When he wakes, there is a thought at the forefront of his mind, in a voice that isn't his. _The spy is loyal to nothing but his country. Remember that._  
  
He's in a hospital bed, covered in bandages and handcuffed to the rail. He remembers vaguely doing a series of escalatingly stupid things. He used to be a scientist. He'd been a good scientist. Now he's a half-dead ex-spy presumably under arrest for treason, with a raging headache and no sensation in his left leg. There's a line of cause and effect here, if he could just find it.  
  
"Feeling better?" It's Darkel. Of course it's Darkel. It's always Darkel. At least the restraints save him from having to see her face.  
  
"I feel awful, but at least my conscience is intact."   
  
"First of all, you can't prove anything. Secondly, you're in no position to pass judgement. Thirdly, you lost, so none of it matters anyway." She sounds delighted.  
  
He's too busy not crying to wonder what her victory entails. "Please go away now," he says, or, well, whines, to be more precise. He shouldn't be in this much pain, there are drugs he should be getting, molecular therapy, this is a civilized world and the only conceivable reason he shouldn't be comfortable is -   
  
"Torture," he says. "This is, you're enjoying this, you-"  
  
She interrupts with an extended dramatic throat-clearing. "Do you know, I had no idea you'd lost control to this extent. You couldn't even find an agent to deactivate the bomb, you just stood in front of it and hoped for the best. Six months investigating the Free Time movement, and you failed to find the terrorist operating under your own nose. Again. First Torvald, then Gillestes, now Antimon. What exactly is it that you _do_ , Narvin?"  
  
He can't think of anything suitably scathing to say. Blame the head trauma. "I protected the president, that's what matters."  
  
"You mean the ex-president, surely. Oh, I'm sorry, you missed that, didn't you. Pandora's taken control. Romana's in a jail cell. If you still have a brain left under all that gauze, now would be the time to do the sensible thing and change sides."  
  
"Nnngh," he says. He's never had to work so hard at not passing out. There are words, probably, in his head somewhere, which he'll arrange and say out loud as soon as the room stops spinning. "Pandora?"  
  
"In the flesh. I'll let you get your rest now, we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow. I wouldn't want you to miss the swearing-in of our new leader. Sweet dreams, Narvin."  
  
There's a faint beeping noise, then the painkillers kick back in. He feels absolutely superb for a few nanospans, really quite lovely and carefree, then he blacks out.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The city has been invaded, as his body was invaded. This is dread, what he's feeling, this empty, dizzy space in the pit of his stomach. He has no faith in the ability of the people to resist Pandora. He's realizing he'd been fighting the wrong battle all along.   
  
A general assembly is called. Cardinals, senators, department heads and reporters all filing dutifully into the Panopticon. Full ceremonial dress. Pandora sits in the front row wearing Prydonian robes she never earned. The rod, the sash, the coronet, the key.   
  
He's watching them, all of them, wondering how many know what's about to happen, how many even care. He doesn't notice Darkel walking up to him until her Inquisitorial whites are in his peripheral vision. He resists the impulse to punch her in the face.  
  
"Your coup, as promised," she says. "I doubt we'll be seeing much of Romana after today."  
  
"This is low, even for you. I had no illusions about your fealty to the state, but Pandora? Really? Please tell me how she's better for Gallifrey than Romana, because honestly I can't understand your rationale."   
  
"It's a bit late to be developing a set of scruples, Coordinator. And I'd watch my tongue if I were you, there will be no place for dissent in the new administration." She bows, smirking as she goes, then heads down the steps to sit next to Pandora, who smiles and shakes her hand like they're old friends. What a monumentally stupid mistake he's made.  
  
  
  
The president takes her place on the center stage for the last time, shaken but unbowed, and says _we must not abandon our home and ourselves, we must not relinquish our responsibilities. No patriot will stand by and allow it to be destroyed._ I _will not allow it, and I will not resign, and I will not rest until the parasite that is eating at the hearts of our world is eradicated_.  
  
It's a rousing speech. Narvin doesn't clap, but then nobody else does either. The cardinals look nervous. The magistrates look bored. Behind and above him, the Senate is whispering intently to itself. This is the government that will fall. No one wants to make the first move.  
  
Coordinator Ithos turns to him and says, "I knew I should have retired last year." Narvin ignores him. He has a feeling there won't be any particular need for a Department of Conservation in the coming months. He taps the button on the arm of his chair and stands up.   
  
"Coordinator Narvin of the Celestial Intervention Agency has the floor," the Speaker says, somewhat uncertainly. "Please state your position."  
  
Narvin clears his throat and says, "I serve at the pleasure of the president." Both Pandora and Romana turn and look at him. "The true president," he clarifies. "The preservation of the state and its ideals take precedence over any political misgivings I may have. I am, first and foremost, a citizen of Gallifrey, and as such my loyalty must be to President Romanadvoratrelundar. I will support her, even if it means engaging in a civil war."  
  
There's a wave of murmurs, rustling, anxious shifting. Ithos is gaping at him, bewildered. "Don't you have a lamppost or something to induct into posterity?" Narvin snaps.   
  
"Senator Weyar of the Eighty-Sixth District has the floor. Please state your position." The Speaker is clutching at the microphone like it's a life line.  
  
Weyar's thin falsetto comes floating out of the gallery above him. "Contradict. The esteemed Coordinator seems to be under the misapprehension that..."  
  
Narvin isn't listening. He's staring at Romana, who's staring back, and she nods, and he nods, and that's the moment everything changes.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
"I received your letter of resignation this morning," Darkel says, face fuzzy through the poor reception. Regular video transmission has been down for weeks; they've been using the emergency broadcast system. Her syrupy condescension comes across just fine. "I'm flattered you thought to send it to me."  
  
"I didn't," he says. "I sent it to Pandora. You just decided to read it."  
  
She smiles. "It's my job to know what goes on in this city. The defection of the CIA coordinator is quite an event, you know. The news that the ex-coordinator was seen running from a building that blew up not half a microspan later - well, you can imagine my surprise. I always thought you were a reasonable man. Romana's really gotten to you, hasn't she."  
  
"I'm doing what's best for Gallifrey," he says.  
  
"You really believe that, don't you. Poor thing. Sooner or later, you'll come to your senses, but I'm afraid it'll be too late. You're a traitor, Narvin, and you're following a madwoman in her absurd vendetta against her own people. You could've had so much more."  
  
"I could've worked for you, you mean. I could've cheered when you bombed the Academy. I could've welcomed that invader with open arms. I could've chosen ambition over patriotism. Perhaps I should've. It's working out so well for you." He is, he realizes, fiercely angry. He finds his hands clenching into fists, a dozen slurs and epithets crowding the back of his mouth. It's an unfamiliar feeling.  
  
"I really don't think you should be playing around with words like 'patriotism', not when you're committing acts of terrorism against the state." She smiles again.   
  
Something in him snaps. "I hope you _rot_ ," he grinds out, then slams his fist down on the monitor's power button. Darkel's face wavers and fades to black.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He's playing field operative, setting bombs, running scared. The city is crumbling around him. He's setting bombs in the artron forum, antique controllers on degraded explosives, this hallowed ground, Leela laughing with the sheer joy of it. Destroying his city, building by building.   
  
He doesn't say much, not really. He lies a bit, just enough. He argues, even if his heart isn't quite in it. The president's been watching him. He wonders if he's giving anything away, his face betraying emotions his brain is too tired to comprehend. He wonders if she looks at him and sees Pandora, sees the creature that had infiltrated them both, the phantom that is slowly unravelling her.   
  
This isn't an army. This isn't much of anything. Half a mile of cable, tape, a handful of remote detonators, two cases of F-20 cartridges, a walkie talkie. Percussion blasts, flash burns, picking shrapnel out with tweezers. He bombs himself and comes to in the outlands, sand everywhere, an imperfectly healed skull and a roiling nausea. Elbon complaining from the shadows of the triage room, an exhausted, dangerous look in his eyes. This is a thing neither of them quite know what to do with. The men they were, the men they're becoming, and Pandora's guards closing in. Inlands, outlands. The fear of what comes from the wild versus the fear of what's behind them. The heat, the unforgiving rock, the citadel shining in the distance.   
  
Romana's gone to the anomaly vault. Narvin's not quite surprised. It's a brave, stupid, clever thing to do; she'll get herself killed. He spares a moment to appreciate the irony of his own half-realized plans being what finally does the Imperiatrix in. Deathless Icino, lying in wait, again and again and again. And he knows, somehow, what Romana will do, when they transmat in and he sees her typing frantically away at the control panel. She thinks she's going to save the world.   
  
It hits him later, after he's nearly blown them all up (again). A Time Lord has a dozen lives and his president is two women, is waging war against herself, is treading the line between herself, was nearly crying when she stumbled out from the sentience's control. He can't stand to look at her. Romana, Romana, holding the ghost of herself in her head.   
  
They wake up as other people. It's basic biology.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
"You can't go home again," Arkadian says. "There's no place left for you here. Whatever you do, you'll always be Romana's man, and unfortunately in this political climate that sort of thing is a deal-breaker." He's been talking non-stop since he got here. Narvin doesn't remember who invited him. This is desperation, this is the High Council giving up, and Arkadian is the vulture circling high overhead.   
  
"I'm not you, Arkadian. I don't run away every time things get difficult." Which is, possibly, a sort of lie; he's more a runner than he'll ever be a soldier. Still.  
  
Arkadian puts on his older-brother expression. "It's more than difficult. It's a lost cause, Narvin. Do you really think Matthias will keep you on? Even if by some miracle Gallifrey recovers to the point of requiring a Celestial Intervention Agency, you won't be in charge. It's too risky, too unseemly. And come to think of it, is Matthias someone you'd even care to serve? He struck me as something of a wet blanket. None of Romana's spark and verve. He certainly doesn't inspire any confidence in me."   
  
"I serve the office of the president, not the person occupying it. My personal feelings are irrelevant, as is my ambition. I will do whatever Gallifrey asks of me."  
  
"But that's just it. Gallifrey isn't asking anymore. What do you have to offer? I'll tell you."  
  
"I wish you wouldn't," Narvin says.  
  
" _Funds_ ," Arkadian continues, undeterred. "The CIA has assets. Technology, information, personnel, even property. Surely there must be something you're willing to sacrifice. A planet here, a Chameleon Arch there. You could keep your people in beer and skittles on the sale of the Thoros IV outpost alone."  
  
"You realize what it says about you that you thought I would even consider what you're suggesting." And there's not much left to sacrifice, he thinks but doesn't say.  
  
"You've sold things before. Tell me, Narvinektrolonum, how long has it been since you've seen your family? Coming on a century now, isn't it. Was it worth it?" Arkadian is doing everything short of actually twirling his mustache.   
  
Narvin tries to sneer, but finds his face isn't quite up to the task. He settles on a sort of distracted stoicism. "My name was mine to sell. Matrix secrets aren't."  
  
"Noble words. Do you find they ring a bit false? You have no influence, no power, and very few options. You're nobody, Narvin. A nobody who nevertheless has access to a great deal of marketable items. I don't want to pressure you into anything, of course, I merely wish to remind you that you have the ability to put out some of the fires currently ravaging the land, and I would be more than happy to broker the necessary transactions."  
  
He wishes he were the sort of man who punched people. Just once, just this once, he wants to give up decorum and reason and lay that bastard out cold on the ground, wipe the smile off his face. But he isn't that sort of man, of course, so he just rests the palm of his hand on his holster and says, "It's been a pleasure talking with you, but I must attend to my duties."   
  
" _What_ duties?" Arkadian is saying, but Narvin's already leaving, the door sliding shut behind him.


	2. Choose Any Direction

  
  
  
  
Leela asks where they go now, and Braxiatel says _Anywhere at all_. Anywhere except home.   
  
The Axis is anonymous and empty, filled with shiny white paneling and self-sufficient computers. There's accommodations for a possible staff but no evidence that anyone was ever actually here. Maybe it built itself. He keeps getting fingerprints everywhere, smudges and scuff marks on everything he touches. He feels unwelcome and unnecessary.   
  
Romana keeps trying to explain it to Leela, like if she could only just translate this into a basic analogy then the overall sense of it would appear. It's like a tree, she says. It's like a river and its tributaries. It's like a forking path. It's like a quarantine.   
  
It's like a space station with portals to alternate universes, he wants to say, but doesn't.   
  
All the hallways look like other hallways. Possibly there's only one hallway, looping and adapting. A few square, rounded rooms with square, rounded furniture. He becomes acquainted with the subtle variations, translucent white, clear over matte white, reflective silver-white, the occasional surprise of a red indicator light. Gentle glow white, neon white, white fabric and white plastic. Nothing particularly wants to be used. There's a hush, everywhere but especially in the hallway, there's a hush that's more than a lack of noise. The silence stands in judgment of their mortal imprecisions. He talks too loudly and clods in and out of rooms, he's perversely graceless.   
  
Each portal has a placard next to it, tiny black type on a small white label. Name, brief description, a string of numbers that mean something but he's not sure what. The wall vibrates, or the projection of the image of the wall vibrates, or his understanding of it does. Braxiatel steps through the place where the wall technically isn't, the heat wave, the material shudder, he steps through and gestures for them to follow. It really doesn't feel like much of anything at all. Take a step and suddenly you're elsewhere. Microhistories and entire universes, collected errors.   
  
It's like a plant with dead stems that had to be cut off, Romana says. It's like the medicines you take when you're sick.   
  
They left and they keep leaving. They try not to talk about home. He feels disembodied, he feels like an affront. He is accidentally here. They don't trust him and he doesn't trust this place, this nowhere, this deus ex machina he never asked for. Gallifrey is dying and he's wandering through a series of escape routes, the black of his robes a stain on the endless, infinite white.  
  
It's like all the mistakes you've made but managed to forget, Romana says, glancing pointedly over at him.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
They walk through a door identified as _Point Call_ , which is twenty seconds of someone being shot in the head. They stayed for five microspans, first because they weren't sure what was happening and then because Romana wanted to know what it meant. A peasant girl pulling a staser from her pocket, firing with steady hands at a guard coming towards her. A neat little hole between his eyes, before the blood starts. The pause before he falls, then the fall, and she puts the gun back in her pocket, and it begins again.   
  
"This is upsetting and pointless," Leela says. "Obviously we cannot stay here. Romana, your time is better spent finding a new home than thinking about what this means."  
  
"It means nothing," Narvin says.  
  
"It means _something_ ," Romana says. "I know we can't stay here, Leela, it's just - I'm curious, that's all."  
  
Braxiatel lays an arm across her shoulder. She doesn't warm at all to that, but he doesn't seem to notice. "It's an event that never should have happened, that never did happen in the true timeline. If you like, we can look it up on the computer, that'll tell you more than watching this will. Hmm?"  
  
Romana takes one last hard look at the tableau (the girl, the gun, the hole in his head, the thump as he crumples to the ground), then lets Braxiatel lead her back to the Axis.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He follows Leela through yet another portal and for the thousandth time tries to figure out how exactly he ended up here.   
  
It's a city, which could be the Citadel, but isn't. It never is.  
  
"The smell is familiar," Leela says, turning around slowly with her nose in the air.  
  
"Visually, it's close. Not the right buildings but the right sort of architecture. The clothing styles are right. Everyone appears to have the correct number of limbs."  
  
"You did not like the world with the centipedes?" She's teasing him, something he's starting to get used to.   
  
"We never would have fit in."  
  
She bounds off in the direction of, what, a smell? A sound? Some mystical feeling? He sighs and tries to keep up.   
  
  
Later that day they come across a lake. In the outlands, where they'd ended up after being chased, where they're waiting for the portal to return. K9 is reporting distantly on its position. Leela says she feels the presence of water, and he doesn't believe her until they reach the top of the hill and he sees the lake below. Maybe the ground changed, maybe there was something in the air, maybe she could hear the reeds brushing against each other. Maybe she just remembered it from the original Gallifrey and was lying. She runs down laughing, taking off her clothes like dead skin, heading straight into the water, as if it's the most natural thing in the world to do, as if lakes are things you just run into. He follows her, measured footsteps, up to the edge, and stops.  
  
"The water is cool and invigorating!" she yells, splashing around. "Come join me and wash the dust away. Or are you scared?"  
  
"Time Lords don't swim," he yells back. "It's undignified. Besides, I don't want to be damp all day."  
  
She sticks her tongue out at him and starts doing a backstroke. He stands facing the direction where the portal will be, arms folded into the sleeves of his robes.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Stripped of her title and ceremonial attire, Romana still looks like the president. He can't help it. It's the tilt of her jaw, how she walks quickly but unhurriedly, sense-memory guiding her legs against heavy fabric that is no longer there, neck straight for the collar's missing weight. She is, for want of a better word, imperial. She demands the room, with all the power she worked so very hard for, and she gets it, always. She's beautiful, he acknowledges, in a strange way, wiry and sunburnt, the careless old blood of Heartshaven, the sharp angle of her hips through loose trousers. Blond hair brushing against her cheekbones. Small hands, narrow shoulders. Marching on like she doesn't know and doesn't care if she's earned this, what's left of Gallifrey trailing behind her, trusting her, like she's half-convinced she's not the right woman for the job.  
  
He's considering telling them he'd had his future surgically removed. He imagines their faces, when he'd say _do be careful, I could die at any moment_ : Leela would be angry and worried, Brax grudgingly concerned. K9 would give him the statistical probability of his being shot/maimed/killed by exposure. Romana's expression is variable. Does she care? Is she cold and calculated, with only a hint of sadness? Is she guilty? Self-pitying? He can't make up his mind.  
  
It's funny, almost. He has no country, no name, no title, no purpose, and now he can't regenerate. He can't remember the last time he was in a TARDIS. If it weren't for the two hearts stubbornly beating in his chest, the language in his head, he'd wonder if he were still a Time Lord at all. Think of it like this: he woke up one morning and realized who he was. A single, solitary man, complete in himself. What he is now is all he'll ever be.  
  
Braxiatel tries so hard to be a new person. He calls himself Irving, now. Like a human. Black tie and three-piece suit, gold watch, cufflinks. He could be play-acting, if it weren't for the sense that he is about to run, any microspan now, and leave them all behind. The Ark is a ruse, he came back for Romana, Narvin knows that. He has already begun constructing the man he will become and one day he will slip through one of those doors (maybe with Romana, maybe without) and never look back.   
  
And Braxiatel talks to Narvin like he is a less successful version of himself. A version perpetually late to the party. The last to come to his senses, the last to get a backbone, the last to abandon home. Braxiatel says _Romana_ as if it's a name like any other; Narvin says it and everyone can hear the echo of _Madame President_ in his voice. He imagines what it's like to be Brax, to be that controlled and precise as Irving. A change far more complete than a spy's could ever be.   
  
Narvin has no Plan B. He loses everything and is left only with himself, which he knows isn't much. A patriot with no country, a Coordinator with nothing to coordinate. He has the key to his TARDIS in his pocket and that is the very last piece of his old life he'll ever hold. He finds himself waiting impatiently for the next excursion, the next Gallifrey, in the vague hope that he'll discover a reason to exist this time. What a self-indulgent, decadent concept, wanting to 'find himself'. He swears he used to be better than this.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Braxiatel's pushing buttons in the control room, Romana's supervising him, and the robot dog is wheeling around the hallways making beeping noises. Narvin's holed up in the kitchen, trying and failing to make a cup of tea. Leela is watching, uncharacteristically quiet.  
  
"I made the water hot. I don't think - nevermind." He puts the cup gently in the sink and stares at it. Steam rises. He leaves it there and attempts to slump down morosely in a chair designed specifically to prevent slumping. Leela is sitting ramrod-straight, of course, even though she's already getting older, hair greying, hands starting to shake. Some strange part of him hurts at that.  
  
"We should not have left," she says. "I'm happy that we are all safe, and I am grateful to Braxiatel, but it is wrong to put ourselves above all the people on Gallifrey who do not have the luxury of time spoons."  
  
He doesn't bother correcting her. It doesn't matter. She has the important parts right. "Every empire falls," he says. "Gallifrey has the unique distinction of being able to take along the rest of the universe when it goes. A single timeonic fusion device could erase all of Kasterborous, and Pandora had twelve. If Arkadian had his way, all that temporal ordnance is in the hands of the Monans, the Nekkistani, any two-bit military that could scrape together the credit. We provided the motive and means for a war, and any war fought with weapons like that - for all we know, the event horizon has come and gone, and the only thing left is dust."  
  
"Thank you, Narvin. I now feel worse than I did before. I knew I could count on you." She smiles brightly, then lets it drop. "What do we do, then?"  
  
He doesn't know what they do. He doesn't know at all what happens next, what the point of this is, why he's here on this cross-temporal waystation instead of where he belongs. He doesn't even know what he's going to say until he opens his mouth and says it. "We run. We run and run and never look back, because the things we let happen, the chaos we've wrought... I'm not sure what we could have done, if we'd stayed. Now we'll never know. All we can do is keep going, and hope we learn how to live with ourselves."  
  
She looks at him askance. "Don't say 'we' when you mean 'I'. You should own your emotions instead of hiding them behind words."  
  
"Psychological advice from a savage, how fascinating. Should I also be performing a rain dance, or perhaps consulting with the spirits?"  
  
"We have no need for rain. Dance for the gods so that they may grant you peace of mind. Also ask to be given better manners." She nods solemnly.   
  
He makes an exaggerated thoughtful face, tucks his fist under his chin. "I left my ceremonial headdress on Gallifrey, do you think the gods will mind?"  
  
She laughs. "I'm sure they'll understand."  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Even on the Axis, Braxiatel has an office. He'd already settled in when they'd first arrived. A desk, damask curtains, walls lined with leather-bound books that may or may not be fake. Cut-glass decanters, statuettes, a box of cigars, a decorative letter-opener. Narvin sits in an armchair placed awkwardly in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front him, deciding where and when each artifact was stolen from. Wondering what precisely the point is of him being here.   
  
"I never told myself about this," Braxiatel says. "I think I wanted to spare him. Spending half my time in this antiseptic machine, the other half discovering the various miseries Gallifrey is capable of. It has the air of a Greek myth, all this endless leaving of home. Condemned to these facsimiles, knowing full well the real thing is gone."  
  
"How poetic," Narvin says, just barely refraining from rolling his eyes. "It's a shame you're separated from your museum, you could have this monologue archived."  
  
"Don't let the cheap thrills of sarcasm blind you to the lessons to be learned here. There are worlds without us, Narvin, and they get on just fine. I'd say it should be a humbling thought, but I'm not sure you're capable of that sort of emotion."  
  
"And I'm not sure you of all people should accuse me of being self-aggrandizing."  
  
"Don't tell me. Pots and kettles, I know. I could have been you, Narvin, very easily. I suppose you could've been me, as well. All of us could have been other people. The universe is not a chess game, it's poker. Texas Hold-'em. The hand you're dealt, and what you do with it. Personally, I've always preferred to cheat. Ace up the sleeve, hmm?"  
  
Narvin's about to make a disparaging remark about human metaphors, and conversational metaphors in general, when the office door bangs open.  
  
" _Braxiatel_ ," Romana says, or shouts, as she stalks across the carpet. Narvin stands automatically. "The key to the communications room, if you please. And sit down, Narvin."  
  
Narvin sits. Braxiatel shrugs theatrically and makes a show of rummaging through his desk, opening drawers and drawers within drawers until he stops, winks, and takes the key from his coat pocket. "Madame," he drawls, and drops the key into her outstretched hand.  
  
He realizes he's staring. He can't help it, somehow. His brain taking note of details he doesn't need, like the angle of her wrists and the way her hair falls over her shoulders. He's still watching her as she slams the door shut.  
  
"Ah," Braxiatel says, in the voice he uses when he wants to seem all-knowing. " _That_ is not a war you can win. Believe me, I've tried. I've given her everything, and she - well."  
  
"She is the president." Narvin intends the unspoken second sentence to be _She doesn't have time for your pathetic affections_ but isn't sure whether it comes across.   
  
"She is, isn't she? Even without a country to preside over. I don't think anything could take that away from her. It's part of her charm. But then, you're aware of that, aren't you? Poor Narvin. I think you'll find a stiff drink and a stiff upper lip will get you through the worst of it."  
  
"Not everyone has the same failings as you," Narvin says. "I am a servant of the state, which currently happens to consist entirely of Romana. That is the beginning and end of it. I don't - _pine_ , or whatever it is you do when you lock yourself in here and sulk."  
  
"Whatever helps you sleep at night." He smiles genially, then reaches into a drawer for a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.  
  
  
Ten spans later, Braxiatel's thrown himself and an analogue of his brother into the void. Narvin supposes he should've seen it coming.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
K9 is finding Gallifrey for them now. He interfaces with the Axis directly, chirping and whirring. The amount of trust they've put in the thing is faintly astounding. Have a question, ask the dog. Need to access a computer, get the dog to do it. It's a toy, more or less. Romana treats it like an oracle. Or look at it like this: the dog does what Braxiatel did, which is make a space between them and what they're doing, a buffer against the guilty things of home and flight and unfixable mistakes.  
  
K9 works the system now but Braxiatel took his purpose with him when he left. The sense of a grand plan, if there ever really was one, is now utterly gone, all the spin of focus and faith swept away. And this is not about them, as such, but their orbital parts in Braxiatel's white-charger fantasy, his dream of himself as romantic savior, the final desperate thing he did before relinquishing the last of his heritage. They're what's left over. Narvin's made peace with his ego and Leela isn't the type to care, but Romana, now, Romana the great leader, the crusader, the Imperiatrix, is faced with the fact that she allowed her agency to be usurped by one man's childish impulses.   
  
Need a decision, ask the dog.   
  
Leela stays behind to, she says, keep K9 company. Narvin and Romana head out alone. They walk through a portal and into the dust-dry hills of eastern Gallifrey, the thorn-scrub desolation. Firebrand country, once. They head north-northwest, towards where the capitol should be.   
  
The valleys, the salt flats, the fossilized sea floor. Everything baked and purified by the suns. They used to set up time loops here, full-scale quantum repeaters, and if it weren't for the sonic booms no one would have ever noticed. The aftereffects drifting downwind all the way to Lungbarrow, where, it was said, the loom produced offspring with chronic deja-vu, or regenerative coupling, or compulsive tardiness.   
  
The one-meter square area he'd buried the TFD in, surrounded by insulation and gypsum dust. The catalog number and threat level, the situation report. What happens after the heroes vanquish the enemy is Narvin transmats into the desert with a shovel and digs a hole of the required depth. Cut a grave into the ground. Gallifrey held onto their failures, even if none of them did.  
  
  
Romana trudges on with great determination, he has difficulty keeping up. "I'm beginning to wonder if we wouldn't be better off going somewhere else entirely. What's the point of a Gallifrey if we don't recognize it?"  
  
"And if we do. Most likely we're already there, so what happens then? Should we disguise ourselves and hide out in a hotel? Should we have ourselves assassinated?"   
  
"We could go to Acapulco."  
  
"I just don't see how this is supposed to work," he says. "Acapulco?"  
  
"All of time and space and we're hiking towards a city that may or may not be there."  
  
"Where best-case scenario, we'll be jobless and homeless. You know what happens to people without proper documentation."  
  
She pulls ahead, jogging to the top of the ridge. He scrabbles up after her, panting, fumbling for his canteen. She's shading her eyes against the second sunrise.   
  
"The point may be moot," she says.  
  
Down below, where the city should be, is a low collection of brownish-grey objects. Smaller blurs moving around.  
  
"We couldn't have brought a pair of binoculars. I'm willing to concede the lack of transportation, but surely binoculars are a thing we could have managed."  
  
She sits down in the sand. He crouches next to her. "Buildings, I think," she says. "Huts, more like."  
  
"We wouldn't need identification, at least."  
  
"All of time and space and we're wandering around the desert trying to find a tribal village."  
  
"We'd be regarded as gods. They'd worship us and our superior technology. They'd bring us offerings, sacrifice animals in our name."  
  
"I'd kill Brax if he weren't already dead."  
  
"Leela could be our prophet." He picks up a rock, examines it, tosses it down the hill. "Stay or go?"  
  
"Go, obviously. As appealing as godhood is."  
  
"The portal comes back in?"  
  
"Three spans, give or take. We can make it if we hurry."  
  
"Failing that, we die of dehydration, our corpses are stripped bare by the wind and sun, and the tribe uses our bones for weapons."  
  
"I'd like to think I'd make a nice necklace."  
  
"And your skull the most coveted chalice. Shall we go, then?"  
  
  
  
  
Romana makes it to the control room and then sort of deflates, like she's suddenly run out of something crucial. "Let's take a break," she says. "A day or two off."  
  
He nods and says "Yes, of course," and she says "Well," and he says "No, no, we could all use some time to gather our thoughts."  
  
She folds herself onto a chair and closes her eyes. She collapses in stages. Gravity is the predominant force here, she wilts under it, folding her body into a compact shape. Gravity and circumstances and events preceding. There's a gauntness about her, a skeletal spareness she usually keeps to herself.   
  
"Well," he says. "I'll be in the library if you need me."  
  
  
They call it a library but there's no evidence it actually is one. It could be anything. Another indeterminate room filled with indeterminate things. They call it a library. It's something Leela would do, and something they'd mock her for doing, the magic naming of things, as if the vocabulary of the familiar could summon the familiar itself.   
  
He sits in the library on one of two white rubber armchairs and goes over his notes. The act of enterprise, like he could convince the universe of his relevancy if he just concentrated. Notes alphabetized and properly dated. Events cross-referenced, personal asides written in code. Tabulations, predictions, evaluations, the formal report.   
  
They take time off. The word is _regroup_. They stand around and hope that motivation finds them. There's an interval, and Romana's in charge of deciding when it's over, there's an interval of however long where they wait for the fact of Braxiatel's absence to assert itself. There are no days here, just spans slowly ticking over. They wait an undetermined period of time for the situation to take hold. He puts his name and identification code on every entry, follows standard CIA composition style. He pretends to be what he actually is. The legerdemain of self.   
  
Romana in the control room with her guilt and exhaustion. A pose of abdication, a physical relinquishing of command. Elbows and knees and the ten-mile stare.   
  
He records what they'd done and then records what they're doing. He catches up on unnecessary paperwork. He becomes acutely aware of himself, the individual aches and pains, the need of a haircut, the frayed edges of his robes. The acrid taste in his mouth left by the processed air and the precisely nutritious food bars, a chemical undertone fuzzing his tongue.   
  
The food comes shuttling out of a dispenser, wrapped in white paper and stamped with Tomato-Cheese or Breakfast or Quiche, although it all tastes the same, the chemical salt and artificial vitamin bitterness.   
  
Leela holds extended conversations with K9. All _Define 'heart-to-heart', mistress_ and _This unit is not programmed to speculate_. She sings songs to it. She tells stories. She makes confessions. The thing abides with mechanical patience.   
  
Romana in the control room like she's just lost whatever it was that had held her together. The past tense of her presidency. He'd been a spy once, and a scientist before that. He punches in a number on the keypad and the machine beeps and rumbles and spits out a grey rectangle in white paper that says Vegetable Medley. Leela asking K9 why everyone's so quiet, and K9 responding _this unit is not equipped to make psychiatric evaluations._  
  
They play fetch, they play checkers. Narvin sits in the designated desk-work area and watches from the corner of his eye. She practices knife technique and K9 critiques her. The lunging stab, the head-lock slice, the downward plunge. She trains as if for the arena, a gladiator in sweat-sheen and leather, the Axis encompassing, dampening, making absurd the efforts of muscle and instinct and clumsy human synapses. The Axis humming and self-cleaning and regulating light cycles. Sun-white, salt-white, bone-white; the implication of violence.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
These are worlds without him. He is dead, or unknown, or has never existed. He doesn't belong here. Leela, for all her many faults, is made for this, adventuring, running, fighting, living on instinct and courage. Braxiatel could've landed in a sewer and emerged with his suit still immaculately pressed. Romana has determination that could move mountains. He's got a battered set of CIA robes and a penchant for head trauma. He's useless and helpless and he could die, for Rassilon's sake, he could _die_ and what would even be the point of it all.   
  
Romana disappears and he just panics, that dry-land drowning, a greater fear than he ever thought he was capable of. He's nothing without her, he knows this now. So he follows Leela, or the wolf inside her, runs across plains that should have been apartment complexes, trying to ignore the burning in his lungs, the ache in his legs and head and hearts, how the only thing keeping him going is sheer desperation.  
  
Then he gets himself stabbed, of all things, with a knife, by a vampire, and he's probably dying and he'd laugh if he could get his lungs to work correctly. He's dying on the cold dirt floor of a nest. Did he mention the vampires? All because he couldn't walk away. Because, after everything that's happened, he doesn't know how to leave Romana, doesn't know what he'd be without her, and she decided to save this stupid, backwards world and he had to help her whether he wanted to or not. So he's bleeding out and it hurts and he's scared, so incredibly scared, and it's ridiculous, and he's ridiculous, and he just wants, really, to live, to keep doing whatever it is they're doing, the three of them, he wants to keep this. He wants to _stay_.   
  
The wolf is staring at him knowingly.  
  
It's a few nanospans before Romana realizes he's down. She looks as panicked as he feels, and he'd be pleased, if he could spare the energy. He'd like to be brave, to die in a properly heroic way, a few meaningful last words, but he doesn't die, just lies there in agony doing his very best not to cry as she cradles him in her arms, her hand pressed against the hole in his chest.  
  
(He remembers how she looked after she'd fought with Pandora for the final time, how small and fragile she'd seemed in the hospital bed, how he'd just then noticed there was a person underneath the presidential robes. He can't bring himself to meet her eyes.)


	3. Chapter 3

  
He overhears a Cardinal calling him Narvinektrolonum and wonders if that feeling is his hearts breaking.   
  
He presses his thumb against the access panel to his quarters, half-hoping the computer won't recognize him. It does. The lights come up and he almost can't take it, almost turns and runs, this false life stretching ahead of him. Everything is familiar but wrong, like in a dream (except he only ever dreamt when Pandora asked him to), the rooms of the man who was him, and not-him. The man he so easily could have been. The man he just watched die.  
  
Everything is neat and organized. Everything is where he expects it to be. He turns on the terminal at the desk and reads the first file, entitled "Resource Management", which is a list of all the many slaves he'd had killed. Him, not-him. He reads it and re-reads it and then gets up and leaves.   
  
His office just reminds him of Braxiatel and that's not so uncomfortable he can't deal with it. The Council building is thankfully vacant, save for a few sleepy guards, and no one notices him run-walking with clenched fists through the hallway, tumbling through the door like it's an airlock, like he can finally breathe.  
  
He's someone else. This could never be his life. He is watching this, watching himself (except it couldn't possibly be him), he is only distantly aware of the import of this. He is feeling, he thinks, a sort of undefinable sadness. He is walking into his office. His breath is catching in his throat and he doesn't know why. He is pouring himself a drink and sitting behind his desk, and he is thinking about nothing at all.  
  
 _What are you doing?_ a voice asks. "I wish I knew," he says.  
  
"Are you alright?" Romana - _Romana_ \- is there, somehow, really there, looking down at him with something approaching concern.  
  
"Madame President. I - I was miles away."  
  
"I noticed," she says, glancing pointedly at the glass in his hand.  
  
"I didn't hear you come in." He stands up, does a strange sort of deferential bow, which embarrasses him even as he's doing it.   
  
"You left the door unlocked. I wouldn't think I'd need to tell you, of all people, to be more careful." She frowns. Disapproving, probably. He doesn't blame her.  
  
He gestures to the liquor cabinet. "My counterpart appears to have been an alcoholic. I'm keeping up appearances. I'm sorry, how rude of me. Would you like something to drink?"  
  
She laughs, which comes out less like there's anything funny about this and more like a placeholder for another, more unwieldy emotion. "I would, yes, thank you. Doesn't matter what, as long as it's strong."  
  
"I'm not sure what this is, but I can tell you it makes you drunk," he says, pouring out a measure of something clear and unlabeled. He hands it to her, and on impulse clinks his glass against hers, a gesture he wishes was empty. "To a better tomorrow," he says.   
  
"To the new regime," she counters. "Long may we reign." She drinks, flinching a little, swallows and licks her lips. She's standing so very close to him.   
  
He can't think of anything to say. Something is shaking inside him. He wants to kiss her, except that's not right, he wants her to kiss him, wants her to whisper in his ear that everything will be fine, wants her to let him touch her, please her, whatever she asks. Some awful, childish part of him just wants, more than anything else, to be held. She downs her drink and steps away. He keeps staring at the place where she'd been.   
  
She's never been particularly observant, and he's grateful for that, that when she smiles and he smiles back she doesn't see the lie on his face, doesn't know how selfish and pathetic he really is. He is, of course, her Chancellor, and only that. The man in the black robes, as always.  
  
"To us," he says, and then instantly wishes he hadn't.  
  
"To us," she repeats, raising an eyebrow. They salute each other. _To the infinite now_ , he thinks, _and our place within it._  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
She invites him to lunch, a set of coordinates and the suggestion he come in something less formal than his Chancellor's robes (which, although he'd passed a law changing the required costumes of High Council members and switched the ridiculous, grand, flowy robes for something more practical, is as far from casual as you can get). He doesn't actually own any other clothing. He shows up feeling impossibly overdressed; she's wearing the plain grey jacket and trousers she lived in when they were Axis exiles. The attire of a Time Lord who has things like days off and weekends and vacations.   
  
He nods at her and squeaks a chair out from the table, sitting down stiffly. "What is this place?"  
  
"I've been reliably informed that this is the most exclusive restaurant in the capitol. Plenty of after-hours wheeling and dealing, and an extensive wine list."  
  
He stares intently at the menu, hands clutching the edges. "I don't. I've never - _Romana_ ," he whispers, an unfortunate note of panic in his voice.  
  
"I'll just order for you, then, shall I?"  
  
" _Please_ ," he says, still whispering.  
  
"You must have been eating something," she says, looking him up and down.  
  
"There's a cafeteria. I just pick things that seem easy to manage, I don't know what any of it is. This world is barbaric, I don't know how you've been able to adapt so quickly."  
  
"I just run with it. Confidence, that's the key."  
  
  
  
Half a span later, the food arrives. It's...it's a _fish_. The whole fish, with head, eyes staring dolefully at him. What is he even doing here. He looks down at the plate, then up at Romana, then back down, and up again.  
  
She sighs. "Fork," she says, holding hers up. "Knife. Like so." She cuts an exaggerated piece of her salad. "Now you."  
  
"I know how to use utensils," he snaps, then promptly drops his knife on the floor.   
  
Romana laughs and he should be angry and wounded but mostly he's just happy to see her enjoying herself, even if it's at his expense. She can smile at him if he does something wrong, he doesn't mind, this is a thing he's come to accept.   
  
"Honestly, Narvin, you're worse than Leela." They both stop smiling.   
  
"Have you heard from her?" He's not sure how to approach this, or if he should approach it at all. Leela is his friend mostly by proxy, but he does care, in spite of himself.   
  
"Not yet. She'll come back, she just needs some time to herself." Romana doesn't sound particularly convinced.  
  
"I'm sure of it." He takes a tentative sip of his wine, and pulls a face. "That's awful."  
  
"It's lovely, you're just uncultured."  
  
He glares at her, but there's no heat in it. "Needs must, I suppose," he says, and finishes the glass.  
  
  
  
  
  
"I should have stopped you before you switched to hard liquor. You have no tolerance for it." She props him up against the wall and keys open the door to her quarters. "Come on, in you go."  
  
"And you, Madame President, are far too tolerant. Wishy-washy, sentimental -" He stops and sways in the doorway. "Do you know, I've never been quite this drunk before."  
  
"How interesting."  
  
"I faked it a lot," he says, feeling pleased and a little chagrined. "It's a weakness, one I never had any use for." He waves his hands vaguely in the air. "Loss of control. I can't lose control. I'm a _spy_."  
  
"Well, congratulations, you're becoming a true man of this brave new Gallifrey." She pulls him into the room and dumps him on the couch.   
  
"This is horrible," he says. "But nice, also. I can't feel a thing. I suppose that's why they do it so much."  
  
"Very probably." Is she always this attractive when she's exasperated? "I'll make your excuses to the High Council, tell them you've come down with something. Did you have anything to report?"  
  
"Not much. I have, somewhere, I have a - " He searches through his pockets. "Here you go," he says, and drops a data pad onto the floor.   
  
"Thank you ever so much."  
  
"Romana-"   
  
"Oh, oh no. I've heard that confessional tone from others, and I am not, absolutely not, doing this with you right now. You're new to this, so let me explain. You want to say as little as possible to avoid mentioning something unfortunate. Whatever you're thinking, keep it in your head." She stands with her hands on her hips, her best commanding expression in place, every inch the president. All the hope in him withers.  
  
"Yes, milady."   
  
"There's a good Narvin." She pats him awkwardly on the head. "Sleep it off. I'll be back in a few spans."  
  
"If you insist."  
  
"I _do_."  
  
  
  
He wakes up before she returns, dry-mouthed and woozy, head pounding. Cut your losses and leave now, old man, before she has a chance to remember what a mess you've made of yourself. Call it damage control. He stumbles out, makes it to his quarters on autopilot, throws up, then passes out on the floor.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
They start building a time machine. He used to be a technician, after all, and she once built a TARDIS from scratch. They've got Rassilon's plans and a requisitioned room Romana tells everyone is for data storage. They work at night, sneaking in with a respectable distance between them (like they're having an affair, Narvin thinks, an old memory of someone else's life nudging at the back of his mind), and cobble together bits of metal and circuitry.  
  
"It's a death trap," he says. "It'll blow up the second we turn it on and we'll be scattered all across time and space."  
  
"Oh ye of little faith," she says. They're working on the central console, which is mostly a pile of repurposed staser pieces covering a canister of the few chronon particles they were able to capture from Project Rassilon, all of it held together with solder, spit, and wishful thinking.   
  
"This could be it, you know. This planet. Even if we somehow manage to get home, there might not be anything left. We came here looking for a place to live, maybe we should just - maybe we should do the best with what we have."   
  
She stiffens, she's angry, of course she's angry. Never remind her of the things she feels guilty about. "I made a mistake, Narvin, and now I'm trying to undo it. We will get this thing working, and we will go home, and we _will_ do what we should have done in the first place, which is clean up the mess we made instead of fleeing like criminals. Is that clear?"   
  
"Yes, milady," he says. "Maybe we should put the console aside for a moment, work on something else. The change of pace could do us good." He pretends to be intensely interested in a spanner. Tools, components, an acrid burning smell. He notices the vein that twitches sporadically in her forehead.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Braxiatel used to enjoy this. The Academy, the students, giving speeches and cutting ribbons, all the honorary doctorates. Narvin's not entirely sure what the use of it is. Then again, this isn't a training ground for time travelers, this is, what, an exercise in self-indulgence, self-regard. They don't seem to be training for much of anything aside from war.  
  
There's a gymnasium where the temporal mechanics wing should be. Geography classes, history classes, the rhetoric of linear space, events fixed and viewed from a distance. Engineering, comparative literature. Philosophy classes taught by people who have never been outside their own heads. Students sit in rows, not circles, take concentrations and not rounds, study Gallifreyan art and Gallifreyan biology and Gallifreyan politics. The limited universe.   
  
Apparently they've been to the moon. Plus the three other planets in the system, and one in the Palisades via an unmanned craft. Five drifter telescopes tumbling aimlessly through space, transmitting images back to a culture that isn't all that interested. Fifty percent of the aeronautics budget goes to the military, forty percent to satellite production and deployment, five to research, and the remaining 5% seems to just disappear into the aether. Everything points inwards.  
  
His speechwriters prepared a short address, two pages of vague encouragements, which he delivered to a room of prospective academics sitting primly in crisp new robes, staring back at him like they knew he was a fraud. It's a lie so big he can't even begin to hide it. This is all there is, now is all we have. The past is a memory and claustrophobia is the coin of the land. Don't reach out, but dig in, find smaller and smaller ways of dissecting the same body. The future will be claimed one step at a time.   
  
They applaud, he sweats under the lights and leaves quickly. There's a back door in the auditorium that should lead to the physics department and the Tarkovendis Collider but instead opens into yet another square, empty room, just desks and screens and maps of Gallifrey, the planet's territories and the city's districts, and you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in until you reach atoms but go two steps outside Kasterborous and there's nothing but star charts labeled with numbers.   
  
Vansell used to say that the ant hill was important to the ant. It's all a matter of perspective, he'd say, and all they know is what they see in front of them. They don't care about you, they don't even know you exist. As far as they're concerned, they have everything they need.   
  
It was called the _Mirador_ , the ship they sent to the Palisades. That's the farthest they've gone. There's a picture of it, up by the podium. They don't need anything more. He sits down at a desk and watches the walls close in.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
She asks him up to her chambers. An impersonal space, despite the fact that he can see the door to her bedroom from where he's sitting. The armchair is overstuffed and scratchy, his heels hover a centimeter from the floor. He is considering the particular brown-gold color of his glass of scotch. He's considering the weariness in the woman who is sitting across from him in her own scratchy, overstuffed chair, feet not touching the floor, glass of wine matching the purple curtains. There are curtains everywhere. The air is a heavy, solid thing. He coughs discreetly.  
  
She looks at the carpet instead of at him. "You said he would have had us killed, and you knew because it's what you would have done. Would you really?"  
  
"Once," he says. "But I'm not as pragmatic as I used to be."   
  
"Don't say that like it's a bad thing. Personally I much prefer the new you, and you should be happy you've evolved into a decent person." She pauses. "You know, he told me we were married."  
  
"Pardon?"  
  
"The real Chancellor Narvin. Not the real one, I'm not saying you're not _real_ , oh, you know what I mean. He called my bluff by pretending he was my husband."  
  
Oh. "Oh," he says tightly. "And?"  
  
"And I went along with it. Stranger things have happened."  
  
"Indeed."  
  
"And then he said he'd sooner marry a pigrat than me. I'm paraphrasing."   
  
"Of course." He stares into his drink. The air is a lake around him. He feels his hearts pounding, hears the pulses in his ear. He can't breathe, can't think, he might throw up. "Why are you telling me this?"   
  
"I'm not sure." She looks at him strangely. "Are you alright?"  
  
"Perfectly fine," he says. His voice cracks on 'perfectly' and he has a brief fantasy of the roof collapsing on him. Or a bomb going off. Or something, anything. He can't _do_ this.  
  
"I've never been married. Never really felt the urge. I think Brax wanted to, but he knew it was hopeless. Did you have a wife? Or a husband?"  
  
He's shaking, he's sweating. He's miserable. Why won't she just stop talking? This would be easier if she stopped and he left and they never, ever had this conversation again. "Gallifrey was my mistress," he chokes out.  
  
"And we're all that's left of it," she says. There's something in her voice, something - he won't read anything into it. He can't.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Fear governs this city. Thirty percent of the state budget went to weapons and defense before they came, and they keep the factories open, because it's expected, because there are too many jobs tied up in the industry, because they don't know how to shut them down. Grenades, stasers, sniper rifles. They keep the assassination business going. He signs off on another order of plastic explosives and wonders how much of it will end up in the hands of terrorists.  
  
Fear governs this city and fear governs him. His fear is a palpable thing, quantifiable, a comfortable lump in his throat. He cultivates it, adds to it, grows it into a creature that stretches through his entire body. There are so many guns in this city. Coups are staged every week. The disgruntled, the disillusioned, the angry and insane. Everyone is a threat. The Panopticon has a thousand vantage points, a thousand lines of sight to the center stage below. He has guards, he has chemical detectors, random searches. He enlists spies. He practices his flying leap. Romana doesn't care, she'll say anything, she's yet to chase the recklessness from her hearts. He looks into the eyes of his fellow citizens and sees murderers.   
  
She doesn't care or doesn't remember that that's how she got killed before. He tries to impress on her the importance of biding her time. Be politic, be polite. Lie through your teeth. Don't startle them. Don't make waves. She does what she wants. He supposes he doesn't expect anything less.  
  
  
  
He tells her about all the agents he'd had spread throughout the galaxy, throughout time. He tells her that some of them are probably still there, walking through manufactured lives. He does not describe the feeling of eavesdropping, the danger inherent. He is talking around the subject of distance.   
  
She says that's the worst thing she's ever heard. She says it's unconscionable, a dirty trick, she never signed off on that. She's disappointed. He knows his inflection isn't enough to carry the weight of this.   
  
He looks at strangers and wishes he could somehow reach inside. These crowds, massed bodies, a writhing thing, each individual unknowable, utterly beyond him. He invents stories for them. A rebel, a jealous husband, a resentful ex-slave. The banalities that make up an existence, the accumulations of a life. Things owned, things accomplished, things lost. A piling up of details. He calculates tipping points, graphs the space between unhappiness and violence. He imagines a gun in each of their hands, and imagines Romana falling, a thousand different ways.  
  
On the Panopticon floor, she says whatever she feels like saying. He wouldn't have it any other way.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
They're building a time machine. She's brushing dirt off the exhaust fan of a skimmer. She's making herself smaller like she does whenever she's unhappy and not also angry at the same time.   
  
She's opening up a familiar conversation. "Sometimes I wonder what would happen if things went wrong. I could destroy Gallifrey again, and this is the only one we have left."  
  
"Bow before the great Romanadvoratrelundar, destroyer of worlds."  
  
"Don't mock. I _have_ destroyed worlds. I tell myself I'm doing the right thing, but I'm just indulging my own personal sense of justice at the expense of entire civilizations. I'm the villain of this piece, Narvin. I've done monstrous things, and honestly, I don't know if I'll be able to stop myself from doing them again."  
  
"I hope you're not expecting any pity from me," he says. "Sympathy, perhaps, if you ask politely. But I've been your left hand for longer than I care to remember, and I've done things for you that were far worse than what happened back there. If you want to flagellate yourself over what you did on Gallifrey, the real Gallifrey, then fine, but don't waste your time and mine by obsessing over the inconsequential half-lives of those temporal aberrations, and don't confuse your sins with the actions of others. You're smarter than that."  
  
"That doesn't make me feel any better," she says. "Although it does make me hate you more, which I suppose is a bit of a distraction." She smiles weakly, then frowns. "My left hand? Really?"  
  
"I do the things you need but can't ask for," he says. "I do what has to be done and allow your conscience to stay clean."  
  
"Well, that's terrifying. Please don't mention it again."  
  
"As you wish, Madame President."  
  
She goes back to cleaning components. He nods once, although he knows she doesn't see it, and starts a system diagnostic.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
She asks him to come to her chambers. It's about the Academy, she says, about how it's still making soldiers instead of scholars.   
  
He tells her he's a figurehead, he just makes speeches and shows up at board meetings. It's an edifice too ancient and strong for him to change, even if he wanted to, even if it were right. This Gallifrey will always need soldiers, he thinks but does not say.  
  
In the middle of a diatribe about his various responsibilities and accordingly crowded schedule, she kisses him. Just like that. Fingers rubbing the bristle of hair behind his ear, her lips hot and dry against his. He replays the scene: yes, that happened. His breath rattles out of his mouth. He can see the pores of her skin, the skull pushing through.   
  
His hand moves to her face of its own accord, thumb finding a place in the hollow of her cheek. "This is one of those cultural variations about which I am regrettably ill-informed."  
  
She rolls her eyes. "It's really not all that complicated. I'll show you. Just, please, can we do this now?" She kisses him again, hands digging hard into his waist. Tongue to teeth. The moaning, boneless creature he's about to become. A jellyfish pooled at her feet.   
  
"Romana, I can't." He bites his lip and unwraps her hands, pushes her away gently but firmly.  
  
" _Narvin_ I swear to you I will have you _vaporized_ if you don't stop dithering about."  
  
He leans his forehead against hers and nudges inside. She's - well. Aroused, mainly. A simple, primal need for contact. He gets that he's there and he's available; he gets a business-like sense of working this out of her system. He gets practicality, guilt, determination that this will happen once and never be spoken of again. Beyond that is a self-made wall and he doesn't dare push further. He steps back.  
  
"This is a bad idea, in so many ways," he says softly. "We can stop now, no harm done, but if I let this continue-"  
  
"Are you _really_ going to turn me down?" she asks. She knows, he knows she does, that she saw the edges of the thing he avoids in himself. The thing gathering at the back of his throat. This drifting, sinking feeling.   
  
She raises a hand to his chest, palm against heartsbeat, and lets her other hand slide down his robes. He's gone.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Leela frequents a dining establishment on the edge of the city, a place brushing against the dome. _Snowglobe_ , a foreign part of him thinks. Inlands, outlands. The world beyond the wall. He stops by at six bells and finds a table near the back, and waits.  
  
She arrives twenty microspans later, alone. She sees him instantly. Her body tense and lithe, angling towards him with a predator's instinct. He raises a glass silently in greeting.  
  
He remembers an afternoon by a lake on another world. A frankness, a raw vitality that his head has no room for. She is younger now, and older, but mostly younger: the wolf is still inside her. The unmistakable motion of reclaimed youth, and something darker, harsher, a smile behind the smile, rows of gleaming teeth. She steps easily around the scattered chairs.  
  
"Narvin," she says, half disdainful, half pleased. "It has been too long. Why have you not come to see me before now?"  
  
"The same reason you never came to see me, I suppose."  
  
She nods. "There is no place for me in your world, and none for you in mine. We have shared much, but it is time we took our separate paths." She looks at him like she finds him wanting, but doesn't mind. "How is she?"  
  
"The president? Making good progress. The former slaves should be released back into the work force any day now, and she's culled the worst of the cardinals. There hasn't been an assassination attempt for over a month. All things considered, she's doing very well."  
  
"I want to know how Romana is, not the president. Is something wrong?"  
  
He hesitates. Nothing is wrong, as such. All these ancient problems. What could he say that she hasn't already guessed? He settles for smiling and sighing and studying the wood grain of the table. Wood grain, furniture made from trees. Not antique, just willfully rustic, or nostalgic. A dead thing under his splayed hands.   
  
"She is being herself, isn't she."   
  
"Who else would she be?"   
  
"People can change. Even Time Lords. Even _you_ , Narvin, are not the man you once were. Why does Romana not see the need for a new life? The old ways do not serve her well anymore."  
  
"You've talked to her recently?"  
  
"I've seen the - 'vid casts'. I do not need to talk to her to know she is pushing herself too hard to do things that are not worth doing. And I know she is alone, even though she has friends. She does not want friends, I think." She gives him a long, evaluating look. He thinks about teeth and blood and bone. "You have changed again, Narvin. Something is different about you."  
  
"I'm the Chancellor now," he says, brushing a hand over his robes. "It requires me to be more accessible, more willing to compromise. I've had to adapt."  
  
"It is more than that. I can hear your hearts beating. They beat strangely."  
  
He laughs, a strangled noise. "It's a strange world," he says.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Fight mechanics. How to say all the wrong things. How to make her shoulders shake with fury. Ask her if she's out of her mind. Ask her if she wants another war. Ask her if she knows what she's doing. Imply heavily you don't think she does. Take an opposing stance on every issue. Circle each other around your shared city, forget you're on the same side. Be dismissive. Provoke attacks, leave openings. Find all the hate left inside you and hand it to her. Giftwrap your fear and resentment. Try to slam automatic sliding doors.  
  
The way her face screws up when she's shouting. The way he likes that. Relationship mechanics: if she's angry, she's honest. Reach inside and hold the blood you find there. It's the best she has to offer.  
  
Alternately go with it. Alternately hide what this actually means to you.   
  
The organization of your obscure desires. The scheduling of nameless, shameful things. She's frantically busy. She has a formal, weaponized kind of busyness. Her secretary makes color-coded daily agendas. Every microspan accounted for. Meetings, briefings, functions, soirees. Time provided for correspondence, a span once a week to catch up on journals. Leisure programming, sleep programming. A series of alarms and notifications.  
  
Narvin finds himself drifting aimlessly from building to building. The Chancellor's job is to allocate. He allocates. The Chancellor is available to the president. She calls, he comes. He is carefully slotted into whatever space opens when something more important runs short.   
  
  
  
The message alert starts chirping halfway through a budget meeting. A dozen bulbous, red-nosed men slumped around a table. One of those slideshows with arrows and bulletpoints and video clips. He sits in on these things every so often to, what, be with the people, show his support, his easy-access appeal. They meet every so often and agree not to make any major decisions.   
  
The message alert occurs during the projected earnings review. He fumbles it out of his pocket, the little silver-grey communicator they all have here, functions for everything you could think of. It's the number Romana uses, not the regular number but the other one. For things like this. The note is filthy and direct, he blushes automatically, itchy heat swarming up his neck and tapping out somewhere around his ears.   
  
"Forgive me, gentlemen," he says. "I must. Attend, to this." He holds the communicator up in the air. "Matter of security."  
  
He's always needlessly furtive en route. He's probably making it worse, ducking around corners, inventing increasingly elaborate excuses and giving them to people who might've otherwise ignored him entirely. Walking alternatingly too fast and too slow. Inappropriate smiles to the guards at her door. He has standard sentences he uses to create the illusion of propriety, things he keeps in his pockets to use as props. Just in case they can hear, or if someone walks in.  
  
Although if anyone walked in no amount of strategically-placed official business would persuade them away from the fact of the president fucking her chief advisor on the couch. He tries not to think about it.  
  
She's already pulling out the things that keep her hair up. Sort of buttressing things, an inexplicable series of pins and clips.   
  
"I read an article today about wildlife in the northwestern sector," she says. She's shucking off her robes. She's efficiently naked.   
  
"There's wildlife in the northwestern sector?"  
  
"Birds," she says, and hands him her underwear. "Those little crow-type things that sound like they're snapping their fingers. And, what."  
  
"The cats."  
  
"Some kind of fox, actually. Not cats."  
  
"Birds and foxes in the northwestern sector. Someone wrote an article about this?"   
  
"I paid someone to write it, apparently. The research grant, you remember."   
  
"Actually no," he says, fumbling with the catch on his boot. She's approaching like she doesn't mind having sex with a man who has one shoe on. She's pulling him back with her onto the bed. She's digging her fingernails into the habitual places.   
  
"There's been sightings of deer," she says.   
  
"We pay someone to write about sightings of deer."  
  
"Unconfirmed reports of pigbears in the sewers."  
  
"They swim?" he asks. He's having difficulty getting into the moment. The more methodical she is, the less he cares. She approaches him like he's a bill she has to pass. Shake hands, cut ribbons, attend forums. She has somewhere to go after this. He finds himself rolling away.  
  
"Was it the pigbears? I can talk about something else. Or not talk. Or maybe do one of those scenarios you think I'm not aware of. I could put the coronet on. Deliver edicts. I hereby decree, blah blah blah, the great rod of Rassilon, et cetera."  
  
"You want the on/off switch?"  
  
"I want you to want me so we can do this and I can make it through the senate address without biting everyone's head off." She props herself up on her elbows. "I could do it myself. You could, I don't know, hide in the closet and watch."  
  
He would enjoy that, as a matter of fact, but it's such a ridiculous, pathetic cliche that he can't even admit to the quick flash of fantasy, the keyhole view of her, holding his breath in the dark. So he says, "Let me just," and rolls back over, kneels in the crook of her, hands on her thighs. She's folding her arms above her head.  
  
"If we cultivate this oral fixation of yours, maybe you'd mouth off less in Council meetings."  
  
"This is the part where we both stop talking," he says. "Hard as that may be to believe."  
  
By now he knows what works. Call it a transaction. She gets her all but constitutionally-guaranteed orgasm and he gets her undone, unmade. He gets sweat and effort and choked-down noises, the raised pulses, the uncontrollable shudder. He likes knowing he can do this, likes keeping the knowledge of her small and surrendered in the twisted sheets.   
  
  
She showers first. He finally gets the other boot off, gathers his things into a pile, feels suddenly vulnerable. Sitting naked on the starchy four-poster bed, one of the antiques of state, listening to her scrub off whatever remnants there are of him.  
  
"Not so many rats," she says, emerging from the bathroom perfectly coiffed and arranged. "The rats are mostly in the east."  
  
"We paid someone to write about fewer rats."  
  
"Hardly any at all. Something about insufficient residential waste."  
  
"Could we perhaps pay them instead to kill the rats. And the foxes."  
  
"Leave the birds, though. They're charming. A city should have birds, they add to the, what would you call it."  
  
"Ambiance."   
  
"Ambiance, absolutely." She checks her watch, makes a shooing motion. "Perform your ablutions and leave, I have tea with Cardinal Jorgen in five microspans."  
  
"Milady," he says. He carries his pile of clothing to the bathroom. It's overlit, white tile floor-to-ceiling, everything smooth and cold and resistant to the failures of his body. He leaves a thumbprint on the mirror. He thinks about leaving for other places.   
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The buildings around the edge of the dome are older than he remembers them being back home, crowding haphazardly against the barrier. The last bastion of an exiled world. They must have torn these down millennia ago in his city. Concrete, stone, brick. Behind him is the needle spire of the Arcalian skyscraper, ahead of him are the mountains, sweeping dark red against the grey sky. In the foreground is a precariously poised assemblage of wood and plaster. A hanging sign with a painting of a pigbear. The word for it is 'pub', which is short for 'public house', which is one of those phrases dutifully carrying a history no one remembers.   
  
The crowd around him bustling, talking, moving in well-worn patterns. All these little people: what do they _do_ with their lives? And no one recognizes him, there is no bright flash of chapter colors, no ceremony. Servants, factory workers, secretaries. A city beneath the city. He imagines this all existed in some part on most Gallifreys, although he'd never had cause to acknowledge it. He knows it's impossible for a society to run on rarified air alone. He knows the difference between Time Lord and Gallifreyan, although there are no Time Lords here, just politicians and landed gentry and a fully capable police force. Still.  
  
All these people, he thinks, who don't care what he does. Who are only dimly aware of the state's mechanisms, who watch the news instead of standing in the Panopticon, who orbit the High Council distantly at best.   
  
He walks into the public house feeling supremely out of place. They don't recognize his face but they know his robes, nod politely and turn away. He wishes there was a CIA wardrobe he could have raided.  
  
Leela bought this place when there were no slaves left for her to counsel, using the funds Narvin had quietly left in an unmarked account. It's fitting, if a little disappointing. There are no battles to fight, and she turned down both the bodyguard position Romana offered and the Chancellery Guard post he'd vaguely pushed in her general direction. So she pours drinks and wipes counters and cooks food. Creature comforts.  
  
She's sharpening knives in the kitchen, braced against a scarred wooden table. He watches from the doorway, turning a glass around in his hand, listening to the noise of metal on metal. "I imagine you have the keenest blades of any restaurant in the city," he says.  
  
"Dull knives are useless even for vegetables."   
  
"I thought you would change the name," he says. He hoists himself onto a countertop.   
  
She pauses, looks up at him. "The people know this place as Kartro's. It is familiar to them. If I changed it, they might leave."   
  
"Give the people what they want."  
  
"There are men and women who come here every day. I think they spend more time here than at their homes."  
  
"A home away from home."   
  
"Stop speaking in slogans, Narvin."  
  
"Familiarity is a comfort," he says.   
  
"You are an odd little man." She puts the knife down, walks around the table and lifts him roughly off the counter. "I have a message for Romana," she says. She's a few inches taller than he is, even in flat heels, taller and more confident and precise in herself. The wolf beneath her skin. He waits helplessly. She grins.  
  
She slides an arm around him, hand on the small of his back, bends him backwards and kisses him soundly. She tastes like iron and salt. Teeth to tongue. She pulls away and squeezes his face affectionately.  
  
"Give that to her, and tell her she is loved," she says.  
  
"It's a generally accepted fact of Gallifreyan life that one just doesn't _do_ things like that. You can get away with it, savage, I can't. If you want to tell her then tell her yourself."  
  
"They are simple words, and only three of them. I have heard your speeches, they are complicated and go on forever. Surely you can manage this." She knows what he means, but she wants him to correct her. Not _I can't_ but _I won't_ , the difference between what he's capable of and what he's allowed.   
  
"I'll tell her you said hello," he says. She knows what he means.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
What to say when you meet yourself, how to interact. Different ways to cover the strangeness. False vanity; irritation; effulgent, sarcastic praise. Yourself as you are and as others know you. Things to say to draw attention away from the fact that your first impulse is to kill the man who is your mirror, not so much out of self-preservation but because you just can't stand him. Blinovitch Limitation Effect aside, it's not a good idea to have two of someone in the same room.  
  
Narvin watches the vidcast of Romana's speech. Maybe Leela's watching this too, paused over a half-peeled potato, talking back to the monitor.   
  
She's convincing. She's commanding. She puts strange pauses and emphases into sentences. The crowd applauds. She walks to the right, and to the left, gesturing with the staff. Big, grand motions. The defiant chin jut. The camera angle makes her look bigger than she really is, more impressive, the flatteringly dramatic light of the Panopticon.   
  
He sees himself standing off to the side. He sees - what, exactly? A little man in robes too big for him. An impostor. He suddenly becomes aware of how ridiculous he looks. How his haircut makes his ears stick out. The shifty, darting eyes. How the ceremonial collar accentuates his round, boyish face and receding hairline. Why, again, does Romana deign to sleep with him? He watches himself watching her. He realizes suddenly that everyone else is watching him watching her. Everyone else can _see_.  
  
He hears himself speak and thinks, Rassilon, do I really sound like that? The absurdity of himself on the screen. That flash of alienation, the distance between himself in his head and himself as he is. Seeing himself as others do. His awkwardness, his various physical inadequacies. He ponders the viability of never taking his clothes off again.   
  
_Poor Narvin_ , he thinks. _You finally decided you wanted to be noticed and you don't like what she sees. Get over yourself._  
  
"Get over it," he says to video-Narvin, still undeniably staring at Romana. "All of it. Just-" He clenches his fists, then unclenches them, and calmly turns off the screen.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
They're building a time machine. He remains fairly certain that it'll explode, that they'll flip the last switch and suddenly see the whole of the universe, the massiveness of time, before they're split apart into dust.   
  
"Leela sends her love," he says, apropos of not much. "She's too proud to come back, but she does miss you."  
  
"Is she doing alright?"  
  
"Best as can be expected. She has an awful little restaurant on the edge of town, it seems to be making her happy." He shrugs. "She's a survivor. She'll be fine."  
  
"I hope so."   
  
There's a pause. He'd like to say it was companionable, but she's too tense and he's too aware of her being tense and the air between them is flat and still and nothing at all like it was before. He pretends something interesting has just happened on the monitor. He waits.  
  
She huffs out a sigh and stands up and there is a moment here, he thinks, a moment where he could say something or do something to stave off whatever is about to happen, if he just knew what it was, if he knew how to do this, any of this.   
  
She's standing and she's leaving. "I think you can take it from here, Narvin. You know I'd like to help, but it's getting harder and harder to find the time. It's the same old story, not enough spans in the day. And with the conference coming up..."  
  
"Of course, Madame President." He gives his best obsequious smile, which admittedly isn't all that great.  
  
"Narvin, don't let's do this again." She looks at him like she wishes she could snap her fingers and fix whatever's making him so damn sensitive. For that matter, he wishes she could too.  
  
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he says. He can't look at her. He swallows hard against the thing in his throat, wills his hands to stop sweating. Wonders what exactly it is that's wrong with him.   
  
"Narvin," she says, then stops. He looks up then, and for a second is convinced she's as lost and bewildered by this as he is. Just a second. Then she turns and strides imperiously through the door, and the whine of the closing mechanism is somehow the most awful thing he's ever heard.  
  
He'll flip the switch and they'll be split apart. Everywhere and nowhere, atoms scattering to the far corners of the universe. He's trying not to wonder what that'll be like.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The traditional duties of the Chancellor are: overseeing the Chancellery Guard, (symbolically) running the Academy, voting on minutiae, influencing the High Council on behalf of the president, prancing around looking important. The Chancellor's new duties include: advising the president, collating the efforts of various departments, monitoring the threat level.   
  
The Chancellor also now runs a network of spies but that's not, strictly speaking, something he's supposed to do. Romana will never publicly admit that occasionally the best way to avoid brute force is to employ subterfuge. She'll never _publicly_ admit, that's the key. He does what he has to do, and she lets him.  
  
He finds someone he trusts - well, someone whom he could easily destroy, and who is aware of that, which is the same thing - to run his as-yet unnamed, unmentioned agency. Miralestrellek, ex-Chancellery Guard. She has a deadpan way of talking he appreciates. Outspoken, but not needlessly so. He gives her the title of Director.  
  
"Director of what?" she asks.  
  
"The agency."  
  
"What agency?"  
  
"How's this. Your first task as Director is to name it."  
  
"And my other tasks, Chancellor?"  
  
He sighs. "Gather information. Embed operatives in sensitive areas. Intervene when necessary. Be discreet. Send me a daily report, but keep an appropriate distance. I can't be seen to be too involved."  
  
So she goes, and so he has an organization now. Delegation, a spreading around of blame. Other people to make decisions for you. Braxiatel used to manage easily enough. He'll divert funds, give her a store front, a cover story, a seat in the general assembly. He'll acknowledge he can't fight all these battles himself.  
  
But there's a part of him, there will always be a part of him that needs direct control. A hand on the pulses of this city, an intimate understanding of the enemy. Before the action comes the thought, and before the thought comes the emotion, and empathy is something he's yet to master.   
  
He rebuilds the device from memory. This Gallifrey has no Chameleon Arch, or any analogue of it, but he can still listen in, can get closer than he does with his agents' reports. Circuits, lines of code, neat rows of wires. Red to black and blue to green. A small metal case. He tells himself it's a valid addition to state security protocols.   
  
And maybe it's not voluntary now, and maybe he takes suspected terrorists in and forcibly implants the chip before retconning them half out of their minds. So it's a little reckless, and more than a little wrong. He's a spy. He doesn't _do_ right and wrong.   
  
And if there's a small rush of anticipation when he sees that first blinking icon on his personal computer that means it's started, that means he's about to push himself into this again, into someone else's life again, it doesn't mean anything. Similarly, the feeling that could be guilt, or self-condemnation, or something else entirely, that feeling means nothing. A primitive reaction, it'll pass.  
  
Lie to everyone but yourself, Vansell used to say. When you can't tell yourself the truth, something is wrong. Step back and re-evaluate. An agent in denial is no use to anyone. But Vansell got himself killed, and Narvin stopped caring what he said long before he died. Nothing is wrong, even if that word meant anything to him in this context. Which it doesn't.  
  
He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. He is standing by a lake. The water is mirror-flat, the air warm, the sun low in the sky. He is thinking, possibly, of fear.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
There's a mistake in his daily report. Nothing much - although he should be more careful, should not easily accept that his attention had slipped - but it's always a little thing, isn't it, that finally does a person in. He observes Romana as if from a great distance. Flushed face, clenched jaw. The hard cross of shoulders and spine. The way she grinds the words out as if they're not at all the words she really wants to use.   
  
He does understand, if only obliquely. There are the usual pressures of the presidency, and the constant fear of discovery, and also the constant fear of assassination. There's Leela, who still hasn't visited, and Braxiatel, who even in absentia refuses to be dealt with in any convenient way (and her feelings for him, Narvin knows, are complex). There is the vast, incomprehensible horror of the war, and the guilt at abandoning her home, her people, her responsibilities. And then there's him, of course, being difficult again, dissembling and smirking and arguing again, being disappointingly himself. And maybe that look in her eyes is her remembering for the thousandth time that she doesn't like him much. Or maybe, most likely, she's just tired and lonely. He's incapable of fixing those things for her, but he's all she's got, and maybe that's what this particular fight is hinging on, their relationship like some kind of cosmic practical joke. The idea that this is it. This is _it_.  
  
So she apologizes for shouting and he apologizes for the error and then they spend half a span reviewing progress reports on the Academy staff with all the professionalism and restraint they can muster. So she buries herself in her work again, and he lets her, because he doesn't know what he'd do if she didn't.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He is taking apart and reassembling a rifle. He knows each piece intimately. Power cell, guidance module, stabilizer, trigger. He knows the weight of it, the balance against his shoulder, the ways his body shifts to accommodate it. The correct stance to use, the muscles involved. He stares through the sights so long the crosshairs imprint on his retinas, the ghost of it trailing. The idea of living through this, living as this, himself a component as the safety latch is a component. A part of something greater. He's going to change the world.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The man who is trying to kill the president this week is huddled in a ventilation shaft, C2766 rifle slid through the grate. The man who is going to kill the man who is trying to kill the president is crawling up behind, quietly, slowly, sidearm first. Narvin is aware of this happening as he stands, hands clasped in front of him, on the Panopticon floor.   
  
Romana is talking about peace and reconciliation, her vision of a kinder, gentler Gallifrey. The importance of reason. Progress, she's saying, means laying down the sword and picking up the pen. There is a choice to be made between compromise and self-destruction. There is a decision to be made about who we are as a society, who you are as a member of it. Soldier or scholar, servant or lord, dead or alive. She's saying, our potential could be limitless if we could only just stop shooting each other. She's saying, we are _better_ than this.   
  
Somewhere in the gallery, a trigger is pulled.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The familiar shape and smell of staser burns. The distinctive way brute energy punches through a ribcage. Director Mira is overseeing the autopsy. He tells the guards he's there to wrap up loose ends on his official report.   
  
She's remarkably calm about this, he notes. She's doing well. He threw up the first time he saw a murder victim up close, though he'd never admit to it, and death still bothers him on a physical level. He keeps his eyes on her and away from the body.   
  
_Always had a weak stomach, didn't you,_ a voice inside him says, and he doesn't bother figuring out who it sounds like.   
  
"If it takes three people to kill someone, who is more responsible? The person who gave the order, the person who organized the action, or the person who did the actual deed?" There's more genuine curiosity in her voice than guilt or anger. He knows precisely the thought process she's working through now. The network of fault and authority, the woman she is now that she's done this. A re-evaluation.  
  
"Don't forget him," he says, nodding to the body on the table. "A victim who gives just cause for his death is not really a victim at all. And we live in a culture that demands we be - pragmatic."  
  
"Of course, Chancellor."  
  
"The president is right to say we need to change to advance as a society. But pacifism doesn't stand a chance against violence. The hearts and minds of the people will not be won overnight. We must remain vigilant, and we must be able to do what she cannot."  
  
He is expecting her to return with _necessary evil_ , or something like it, something to express the dichotomy she now inhabits. Instead, she says, "Someone should tell the president that progress is a type of violence. The sacrifice of the past for the sake of the future."  
  
The phrase _time traveller_ re-registering suddenly in his head. The artron energy now wasted and dormant in him. Time traveler, observer, interventionist, invader. His TARDIS key vibrates in his pocket, or maybe that's just his imagination.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
He's following himself. He's watching himself through a telescope, he's taking notes. Schedules, routines, known associates. He's taking pictures, recording videos, combing through assembled footage. He's finding weaknesses, vulnerabilities. A frequently-played clip of him talking with the president, there, do you see that, his hand on her elbow, how close they're standing.   
  
He's watching himself through the crosshairs of a rifle. There's a sudden, blinding flash of pain, and then he isn't watching anything at all.  
  
In the black, someone's saying his name. He forces himself awake, reaches out blindly to turn off the device. His office swims into focus. There's a hand on his shoulder. A hand, and an arm, and.   
  
"Narvin?" Romana asks, and maybe it's just side-effects, but she sounds nearly worried.  
  
"How long have you been here?" His voice crawls out raggedly.  
  
"Long enough." She breathes in deeply. "For a nanospan there, I thought I'd have to call a medic."  
  
"I'm fine."   
  
"You don't look it."   
  
He laughs humorlessly, but says nothing. Peels the electrodes off. Wipes the sweat from his forehead. Swallows. Swallows again. Considers the particular boneless feeling.  
  
She allows the silence for a moment, then breaks it. "What are you doing?"  
  
"It's classified."  
  
"I'm the president. I have the highest possible security clearance. _Tell me_ , Narvin." She takes her hand off his shoulder, steps back, stares at him before sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk. The low-slung, uncomfortable chair he normally uses to intimidate his inferiors. She still manages to look presidential.  
  
He holds his hands out, palms up, as if to gesture: here, a box with all the information in it. "I was spying."  
  
" _Narvin_."  
  
"Do you remember," he says, then pauses. "Nevermind. I, this," he gestures vaguely to his computer. "In order to keep watch on subversive elements and prevent your assassination, I re-created... That is, I, um-"  
  
"What. Were. You _doing_?"  
  
"I covertly implanted recording devices into several known terrorists. I was - reviewing the data." Not bad, all things considered. "Would you like to try it?"  
  
She makes a face that he translates as _what is_ wrong _with you?_ but later, behind locked doors and under bedsheets, will mean something else entirely. Like _I'm sorry_ , like _you don't need to suffer for me._ Like anything at all other than what it actually is.  
  
Now she is clenching her jaw. Now she's doing her best to be cold and removed. "Sometimes I'm reminded of just how little I understand you."  
  
"Only sometimes?"  
  
"Don't be coy. And you obviously don't know me all that well either, if you thought you could get away with this." She folds her arms and tilts back in the chair. Her microscope gaze.   
  
"I know you," he says lowly. His voice still isn't working right. Like slow-motion coughing.   
  
"Don't tell me you've smuggled one of those chips under my skull-"  
  
"No. _No_. I'd never - I couldn't. But I do know you." He twists his spine experimentally. "Would you like me to elaborate?"  
  
"Not particularly. I doubt it'd be flattering and I'm not in the mood to hear criticism from you."  
  
"And then again," he says, pretending not to have heard her, "sometimes you're absolutely unfathomable."  
  
She snorts. "Aside from Leela, I'm probably the least mysterious person on this planet."  
  
"The things you do to me," he starts, before realizing what it is he's about to say.   
  
She doesn't even have the decency to look confused. She doesn't look like she's feeling anything at all, aside from the angry frustration she always has around him. "This has to stop."  
  
"I know," he says. "All of it." He turns the box over in his hands, over and over. Here, all the answers you want. He sets it down on the desk, then reaches for his staser. He looks at her, he's searching for the right facial expression. Can't find it, of course. Doesn't even really know what he's looking for. He shrugs, then aims at the little grey box, blows it into fragments. The sound echoing, dust settling. "One down."  
  
A wave of fear slips through before she's just angry again. He know he shouldn't be, but he's pleased that he can still get to her, that there's anything left in her to get. "You've lost it," she says, or shouts; she's shouting now. "You're _insane_. I can't believe I ever-"  
  
He's waiting. She doesn't finish the thought. "I have a meeting," she says, voice wavering slightly. "Good day, Chancellor." She stands up, turns hard on her heels, walks in a straight line to the door, not looking back.  
  
"Always a pleasure, Madame President," he calls after her, but she's already gone.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
It's a lot of details. His brain is still processing them as _what just happened_ , a localized temporal variation, five seconds that refuse to solidify into an event.  
  
He walks into the room. Call it a tableau. A man in a chair, Chancellery Guard in formal red and whites, restraints pulled tight around his wrists and ankles. Something on his head, electrodes leading to a computer playing iterative personality code. Director Mira, standing a calculated distance away, face blued behind a protective shield, pulling the trigger on a staser. There's the squawk of rushing energy and the crackle of burning fabric and the man biting down hard on the gag in his mouth and his body arcs, one nanospan, two nanospans, then he slumps down.   
  
_She's mine,_ he thinks, slightly hysterically. _I did that._ He taps hesitantly on the wall.  
  
She pulls the visor up over her face. "Good evening, sir."  
  
"Why did you shoot that man?" he asks. He's aware of a note of panic in his voice. She doesn't seem to notice.  
  
"It's how we make assassins, it stands to reason it would be an appropriate process for spies as well," she says, like it's the most natural thing in the world. They kill them, then, that's what happens.  
  
"Yes, yes of course. Absolutely. Excellent work." He takes a deep breath. "And he'll be reconditioned."  
  
"Yes sir, using a variation of the Bader-Kellis metric. Would you like to check the program yourself?"  
  
He's done this before, he knows that program cold. Percentages, a man's life broken down into percentages. "No, I'm sure it's fine. Carry on."  
  
"Was there something you wanted, sir?"  
  
There was, but for the life of him he can't remember. It'll come to him. It can't have been all that important. "I'm just doing the rounds. Seeing how everything is going. Don't let me keep you."  
  
"Thank you, sir. Until tomorrow, then, sir." She nods deferentially, then sits down at the computer, hands over the keyboard like she's done this before.   
  
  
So they kill them, but it shouldn't be that big of a revelation, considering they kill everyone else. It's not about violence or bloodlust, just expediency. Matter-of-fact efficiency. He hasn't done his homework, is the problem here. Everything they do, everything they take for granted. This is a foreign country, he can't forget that.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
There is only one city on Gallifrey. The city _is_ Gallifrey. The land outside, the mountains, the sea, the endless untouched plains, are as ignored here as they were back home. The planet is the thing the city resides on, and the city is the thing that sustains the idea of Gallifrey, all that name embodies, the history, the power, the faith he once had. This is, of course, not his city. It's a near-perfect duplicate, physically speaking, all the buildings and streets he remembers, close enough that he can look up at the skyline and pretend to forget and almost, almost feel like he's where he belongs.   
  
Gallifrey is the citadel and the citadel has fallen. He follows the ghost of it around. The dwindling artron energy he keeps trying to spark back to life, the time machine that won't start, the blood in his veins and in Romana's veins. The thing they tried and failed to find in each other.   
  
She's barely spoken to him in weeks. What he's feeling is betrayal, not of himself or anything so petty as a _relationship_ but of the city, their city, and her promise to it. She's stopped searching. She's making do. She's compromising, which for all her faults is not a weakness he'd ever subscribe to her, giving up, giving in, letting go.   
  
Of all the causes of this drifting sensation, this distance from everything, the one he'll admit to is the fear he'll die in a city he doesn't believe in. That she'll die here. The last part of himself he still recognizes: Romana is his president and this place does not deserve her.  
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
Heartshaven sits by the white cliffs that rise harshly over the Petraean Sea. There's a lighthouse, still standing after millennia of disuse, the mirrors at the top reflecting the twin rays of the suns out to ships that no longer come. The water foaming violently below, weeds clinging to the rocks. He's standing on the edge looking down, the wind whipping his robes, that peculiar combination of salt and granite, something decaying, and he's wondering why he's only just now realizing what his home planet smelled like.   
  
The sea stretching out before him, waves and swells flattening out into horizon. Heartshaven at his back. They'd come here, Romana's ancestors, built a manor house and a small town of servants' quarters, huddled together against the sky and precipice. This of all places. The fear of the familiar danger that comes from inland, and the fear of what lies in the uncharted deep: the manor faces the sea. He's not all that surprised.  
  
The Cape of Good Faith, the northernmost turn of the continent. The island he used, in another life, to process CIA operatives newly in from the cold lies two miles out. Black Rock, the white cliffs, there's a metaphor in there somewhere but he's not the person to find it. He wonders if she ever knew, if she stood here watching for the tell-tale spark of the transmat arcing into the air.  
  
"There's a fence," she says. "Back home, on the real Gallifrey. So no one falls off."  
  
"Or jumps," he says, still leaning into the wind. "Though I suppose one could simply climb the fence. Was there a lighthouse?"  
  
"Pardon?"  
  
"Back home," he says, feeling the weight of the phrase. "Was there a lighthouse?"  
  
"No. Not in my time, anyway." She steps forward, toes on the edge, shoulder just brushing his. "We should get back to the reception. Our absence will be noted."  
  
"I hate parties. I've put in my time, you don't need me there." He turns to face her, trying to catch her gaze. "You go." He takes his collar off, something he's been wanting to do all night, wincing a little as the brocade slides roughly over his skin. He sets it down on the ground, looks at it with suspicion, wonders for the thousandth time what master torturer designed it, and whether he can get their contact information.  
  
"Narvin..." Hesitating, oh, that little shred of regret she likes to air out. She could say _I want you there_ , but she doesn't. Maybe she's thinking it. She reaches out tentatively, puts a hand on the back of his neck, thumb against the soft spot behind his ear. "Well. I'll be going, then."  
  
He nods, and looks away. The tide is coming in; the water, the wind, the rocks, the thing crowding his chest. The faint sound of the guards snapping to attention as Romana reenters her ancestral home.   
  
The thing building up and up inside him, and he doesn't know what to do with it, and so, without really thinking about it, he kicks the collar, hard as he can. It tumbles off the edge undramatically. Doesn't even make a noise when it hits, or a splash, just sinks, sinks down until he can't see it anymore and he is aware, obviously, of what a stupid thing that was to do, and that he'll have to come up with a cover story for why he doesn't have his custom-built, one-of-a-kind official Chancellor's collar, because _I kicked it into the sea in a fit of pique_ will never fly, not with the Council's tailor and certainly not with Romana.   
  
All these big grand gestures, emotional compulsions, but if he's honest he left the rational world behind a long time ago. Call it blending in, acclimatizing. Every action here tends inward.  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
The Crown and Castle closes at two past final bell, Kartro's at three. He's not sure when he started memorizing operating hours. There's a block and a half between them, a pause he spends working up the nerve to do this. He's never argued when people called him a coward. But this, this he needs to do. There are hinge points, remember.   
  
Leela can see through him. Leela has always been able to see through him. Instinct, when did that become a thing he put faith in? And it was easier when the only thing there to find was the fact that he was a bastard. This would be easier if she still hated him. Now she looks at him and she's concerned. He's had enough of everyone's concern.   
  
"Savage," he says, half-heartedly.   
  
"Liar," she replies, with entirely too much warmth. "Come, sit at my best table, I made a soup today I would like you to try."  
  
He doesn't have a chance to decline. Two microspans later he's looking down at his usual drink and a large steaming bowl of whatever-it-is. "Delicious, I'm sure," he mumbles, then pushes it away, picks up the glass and takes a preparatory sip. "Leela, I want you to go see Romana."  
  
She stiffens. This is still a delicate topic. "She has not made any attempt to contact me. She may be the president but she has free will, and can do as she pleases. She does not want to see me."  
  
"Of course she wants to. She just - she can't. She'll never make the first step. She's too proud. It has to be you. Apologize, or don't, it doesn't matter. Just go see her, or you'll spend the rest of your life wondering why she never called."   
  
"Narvin."  
  
"Hmm?" He's stirring the soup, spoon rotating at an average rate of six centimeters per second. All the bits whirling around. Root vegetables, herbs, chunks of an unidentifiable meat.   
  
"What happened?"  
  
He stops stirring. The soup keeps spinning. "Nothing. Nothing happened. Leela, swallow your pride and do this. For her sake, for yours. For mine, if that has any currency with you."  
  
"Last call," she yells abruptly. "Everyone has to leave now. You don't have to go home, but you cannot stay here."  
  
"I commend you on your improved grasp of idioms, but 'last call' means last chance, last - they can all get another drink."   
  
She's got that concentration face on, like she's storing the information away in a mental box labeled _Things People Say Without Knowing Why They Say Them_. "You can order one more item and then leave. No...'loitering'."  
  
"Same as before," he says. "Twice."  
  
  
Half a span later, the place is empty save for the two of them. She's sealing bottles and stacking glasses, wiping tables, turning off lights. He's dropping the first drink's garnish into the second. He likes this part, where basic motor skills require so much attention that he doesn't have the time to worry about anything else. There's no details here, like everything's disappearing, like he's slipping out of himself.   
  
"You'll talk to Romana," he says, enunciating carefully.  
  
"I will. And I'll tell her that our mutual friend Narvin is a drunk. I thought spies couldn't lose control?"  
  
"Ah, yes, but I'm not a spy anymore. I'm a politician, and politicians are supposed to drink. How else would we sleep at night?"   
  
"By not doing things that keep you awake," she says. "Go home, Narvin."   
  
  
He goes, eventually. Or, not home, since that's a thing he can't do anymore, _go home_ , but he follows the streets he almost knows, winds up in a place calling itself his apartment. They tell him he lives here, and the lock always recognizes his fingerprints, even when he just sort of slams his palm against the scanner. He stumbles in and collapses where the bed used to be, not where it actually is, and there's a brief moment where he's afraid he might cry, but he gets up and tries again, manages to land crosswise on the mattress, and falls asleep with his boots still on.   
  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
There's one piece missing. Otherwise it's finished, the thing that's ostensibly a time machine. He thinks it might work. All it needs to do is find the Axis, just reach one set of coordinates, one epoch. He figures the chances are good, good enough to risk it. Any chance is good enough to risk it.  
  
All that's left is the thing that actually makes it start. The one piece of code he doesn't know how to write. Maybe Romana would know, but he can't ask her, not now. This is something he does on his own.  
  
He spends a quarter of a span staring blankly at the wall, before his hand moves, almost of its own accord, to the lower reaches of his pocket. The TARDIS key. He rubs a thumb over the raised metal, the faint energy buzz of his name below the Warpsmith insignia. Inside is a tiny sliver of circuit paper, the imprimatur. It'll do. He pries the key apart, gently takes the paper out and tapes it in place underneath the console. The machine hums approvingly.  
  
This is a situation where he should leave a note. _If you're reading this, then._ Then I'm dead, then I'm sorry, then unfortunately you're stuck on this planet forever. He tries, seven times, to write something, but none of it is right, and none of it says what he means, or it says too much, and eventually he just gives up.  
  
He drops the key into an envelope, seals it, writes her name on the front, and leaves it in the middle of the floor outside.  
  
There's a console, and a metal box around it that's just barely tall enough to stand in, and a rotor powered by the very last pieces of Project Rassilon and about two pints of his own blood. There's a monitor and keyboard, but the instructions have been set for weeks. The decision's been made. This is what happens.   
  
He breathes in, and flips the switch.


End file.
